ABSTRACT
Most studies of the Christianisation of the Roman and medieval world are based mainly on written sources and tend to exclude material evidence, or confine it to Christian art and architecture. Negative evidence for the growing impact of the new religion, that is the destruction of pagan monuments and art, is beyond their remit, except for relevant reports in biased hagiographical sources. Publications compiling evidence for destruction of pagan images are few and far between and tend to have a comparatively narrow geographical focus.2 Even if clear cases of temple or image destruction or clear cases of voluntary abandonment are not easy to track down, detecting them requires detailed scrutiny of numerous archaeological reports. Few scholars have the time or resources to cover more than a smaller geographic area. Their work adds important components to the bigger jigsaw puzzle, but cannot reveal on its own whether or not the observed fate of religious monuments at a single site or in a small region is typical of paganism as a whole.
