La arqueología judía de la Antigüedad Tardía y las limitaciones de la »taxonomía cultural«

Abstract

Recent research in the emerging field of »Jewish archaeology« in Spain and Portugal has led to a greater visibility of the Jewish presence in the archaeological record. However, while segregated medieval communities had more visibility in archaeological sites, the interpretation of findings belonging to late antiquity depended on certain theoretical premises oriented towards »cultural« taxonomies that were traditionally applied in archaeology. Excavations from the 1990s together with archival reviews of sites associated with the late antique Jewish presence allowed for a contextualization of these finds, primarily in funerary spaces such as the ones found at Águilas (Murcia) and Mas Rimbau (Tarragona). Rather than identifying a culturally distinct group, we are presented with a Jewish community that participated in the civic norms of late Hispano-Roman society, despite the fact that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman and post-Roman states. Based on this, a new approach to Jewish archaeology is presented here, focused on the ways through which this minority expressed its identity within mixed spaces, thus leaving behind aprioristic models of cultural classifications.