Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 39:3 (Summer 2025)
Article: Breaking The Silence On Women Leaders In The Early Church A Review Of "Excavating Women: The Archaeology Of Leaders In Early Christianity"by Carina Oliveira Prestes (Fortress, 2025)
Author: Mimi Haddad

PP 39:3 (Summer 2025) p. 25

Breaking The Silence On Women Leaders In The Early Church
A Review Of Excavating Women: The Archaeology Of Leaders In Early Christianityby Carina Oliveira Prestes (Fortress, 2025)

Mimi Haddad

Exquisitely researched and thoroughly reasoned, Excavating Women: The Archaeology of Leaders in Early Christianity traces archaeological markers used to honor women leaders in pre- and early Christian centuries. From Greek and Roman temples to tombs, churches, and catacombs, archaeologist and professor Dr. Carina Prestes excavates women’s leadership at odds with literary texts of their day. As her analysis unfolds, we learn how one generation spoke to another in the language of archaeology, repeating and repurposing leadership markers in clothing, objects left in tombs, mosaics, and inscriptions that, once seen, are impossible to ignore. Excavating Women includes numerous images to illustrate her conclusions. As ancient stones cry out, Excavating Women is a book whose time has come!

The author begins by describing her methodology and the scope of her work in ch. 1, which is both a compelling epistemological strategy and one she has pioneered.1 Chapter 2 examines lesser-known markers of women leaders prior to Christianity. Once documented, these markers are carefully traced in both the burial and mosaic remains, illustrating women serving as deacons, priests, bishops, and elders in chs. 3 and 4. Piecing the evidence together, ch. 5 considers the history of women leaders from antiquity through the early church and into late antiquity—a legacy that confronts errors and biases in literary accounts of women leaders from these very centuries.

A New Methodology Yields New Evidence

Each chapter stress-tests Prestes’s methodology to yield impressive results. In the first chapter, titled “Introduction: Context, Scope, Method,” Prestes begins by noting the paucity of historical research on women—a bias that is all too common. Because of this, she has developed a process that assesses the archaeological artifacts depicting women’s lives and leadership alongside the relevant texts in same the timeframe. She writes:

there is currently no publication that documents the chronological development of women’s participation in Christian communities based on a broad analysis of evidence from different artifact classes including a wide variety of artistic media. (4–5)

In ch. 1, Prestes recognizes two leading scholars—Dorothy Irvin and Christine Schenk—both of whom are archaeological experts on women leaders in the early church. And both are, therefore, well-known to CBE.2 As archaeologists, they ...