Christian Archaeology

Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann was an archaeologist and art historian whose primary interest was the study of early Christianity. Deichmann's many publications cover various topics in early Christian and Byzantine archaeology, including sarcophagi, mosaics, architecture, and painting. His studies also encompassed facets of early Christian art and architecture throughout the late Roman and Byzantine empires--ranging from Nubia and northern Syria to Rome, Venice, Constantinople, and, especially, Ravenna. Deichmann was--at different times in his career--a studious cataloguer of primary data, an accomplished interpreter of historical and iconographic meanings, and an important explicator of scholarly and scientific method in the field of early Christian archaeology.

Deichmann was born in the German city of Jena in December, 1909, and died at Mentana, the Roman suburb in which he lived, in September, 1993. He was educated at the universities of Graz, Munich, Jena, and Halle, from which he took his degree in 1934 with a dissertation on the ground-plans of early Christian churches. The dissertation was published in 1937, and marked the first of a long line of important publications of various types (Farioli Campanati; "Deichmann").

Deichmann began his professional career with a brief term (1938-41) at the State Museum of Berlin, where he worked in the Early Christian and Byzantine Archaeological section. At Berlin Deichmann's primary area of interest was the study of Byzanti

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ster," rather than "a trailblazer or a dramatic theorizer" (Barker 959). Yet, these works provided the "bread and butter for generations of scholars" to come (Barker 959). Deichmann continued to undertake fieldwork during the 1960s, most notably with an expedition to Nubia in 1964 (Grossmann). And, he continued to publish the results of this, and earlier, fieldwork throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. His study of several Syrian excavations, Zwei spStantike RuinenstStten in Nordmesopotamien e Qalb Loze und Qal'at Sem'an (Munich, 1982), several shorter papers, and his Nubische Forschungen [Nubian Studies] (Berlin, 1988) addressed the archaeological evidence for the emergence and establishment of the Christian church in these outlying areas of the Roman empire. In 1981, Deichmann, working with Joachim Kramer and Urs Peschlow, assembled his Corpus der Kapitelle der Kirche von San Marco zu Venedig (1981), which is currently being translated into Italian (Farioli Campanati). This study of the 600 capitals of San Marco in Venice, which includes "the largest existing collection of [300] reused antique, late antique, and Byzantine capitals," reflected Deichmann's continuing interest in the movement of Christianity throughout the l

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