Purity in Seclusion: Exploring the Anchoritic Lifestyle through an Archaeological Lens

An aging woman kneels next to a grave that has been dug in the dirt along the wall of a one-room cell. This is the cell she has been confined to for life, a tiny room off the main chapel of the village church. The grave yawns wide, dark and foreboding, in the corner of her little room. The tips of her fingernails are still black, filled with the dark earth of the grave they have moved for the day. After her morning prayers, she will meditate upon her mortality, the inevitability of death, and on the comparable suffering of Christ as he too, dug his own grave, so to speak, willingly letting himself be taken by the soldiers on the Mount of Olives to what he knew would eventually be his own agonizing death.