STORING IN THE CHURCH: ARTEFACTS IN ROOM I OF THE PETRA CHURCH

Excavations of some Byzantine churches in Palestine and Jordan have revealed the existence of stored material in rooms adjacent to the churches. Room I of the Petra church yielded a particularly interesting corpus of material, ranging from papyrus scrolls through glass and metal objects to wooden storage furniture, which provided the opportunity for a detailed study of artefacts and their spatial relationships, both to each other and to their architectural context. The following text summarises this discovery, concentrating on patterns of storage and changes in the function of Room I within the framework of the history of the Petra church.