Galilee has been excavated intensively, and what has come out complicates the textual picture in useful ways.
Dozens of ancient synagogues have been found in the region, some of them richly decorated. Several carry mosaic floors with a zodiac wheel, the sun in a chariot at the centre, and the seasons in the corners, alongside biblical scenes and dedicatory inscriptions in Aramaic and Greek. Whatever the rabbinic texts say about images, the communities that paid for these floors evidently did not read the prohibition as excluding them, and the gap between prescriptive literature and actual practice is one of the standing lessons of the region's archaeology.
The dating of these buildings has repeatedly been revised, and Jodi Magness's work on the material has shown that several long assigned to the second or third century belong to the fifth or sixth, which changes the story: the flourishing of Galilean Jewish village life turns out to overlap with, rather than precede, Christian dominance of the province.
Capernaum illustrates the same difficulty. A synagogue in white limestone stands over an earlier basalt structure, and a short distance away an octagonal church was built over a house that had been modified for public use, with Christian graffiti on its walls. The house is traditionally identified as Peter's. What can be said is that a first-century house was venerated by Christians early; the identification itself rests on tradition.