Preliminary Materials

Chapter Summary

This front matter section of the book titled Inscribing Devotion and Death contains the table of contents, a list of abbreviations and the preface. The book responds to the archaeological evidence for overlapping Jewish and Christian populations from North Africa with four distinct methodological moves. First, it reassesses the state of the corpus by evaluating the methods used to collect the North African data identified as "Jewish". Second, it liberates the archaeological evidence from the polemical gaze; it organizes the Jewish material evidence by replacing traditional literary taxonomies with internal and archaeological ones. The third methodological step identifies particular models of cultural dynamics that facilitate substantively contextual examinations of North American Jewish archaeological evidence. This permits the fourth step: to prioritize the examination of Jewish materials in a local cultural matrix.

Keywords:Christian population; Jewish population; North American Jewish archaeological evidence