RAC/TRAC Session 14: Sacred Landscapes in the Roman World: Concepts and Approaches

Conference Sessions and Abstracts - Saturday 13 April 2024

14. Sacred Landscapes in the Roman World: Concepts and Approaches

Francesca Mazzilli – Universität Münster; Royal Holloway
Eleri Cousins – Lancaster University

Sacred landscapes are becoming a near-ubiquitous archaeological framework for understanding ritual and religious behaviour in the Roman world. That ubiquity, however, conceals a variety of conceptions and usage, ranging from casual shorthand for distributions of religious material, to highly technical GIS analyses of viewsheds and least-cost paths, to heavily theory-driven phenomenological explorations of natural environments (to name but a few). This diversity of approach is welcome, but it does also invite critical reflection on what we can and do mean by sacred landscapes in the Roman world, and the methodologies by which we investigate them. To this end, this session will invite paper proposals that seek to explore these varied conceptions of sacred landscapes and ignite conversations on their nature and meaning, both in antiquity and in archaeological discourse. Potential topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

• Contextual definitions of sacred landscapes (e.g. urban vs rural, macro vs micro)
• Micro-, meso-, and macro-approaches to sacred landscapes
• Exploration of particular sacred landscapes in the Roman world
• Dynamics of multi-period sacred landscapes
• Quantitative and qualitative methods for defining and understanding sacred landscapes
• Phenomenological approaches to ritual activity in landscape settings
• Relationships between sacred landscapes, human activity, and the environment

Session schedule 

Abstracts 

 Social agency and a multi-layered approach to understanding rural sacred landscapes in the Roman West
Ralph Häussler – University of Winchester

Rethinking our methodologies for sacred landscapes, we aim for a multi-layered, more holistic approach. Thirty years after Tilley’s Phenomenology of Landscape, pragmatic and functional approaches to sacred landscapes are still very influential in scholarship. How appropriate are concepts like ‘geosymbols’, ‘landmarks’, ‘taskscapes’ and political ‘manipulation’ really in our endeavour to comprehend Roman sacred landscapes? My starting point are rural places of worship of diverse size (e.g., non-architectural sites, rock and hilltop sanctuaries), notably in more remote mountainous locations in Roman Iberia, Gaul and Noricum, where we can explore the multilateral relationship between nature, animals and humans, and how this affected diverse human understanding of the divine and their ritual activities. Cross-cultural examples (e.g., Tibetan yul lha) can provide food for thought to understand religious significances, human experiences and ritual activities. Some Roman-period sites attracted long-distance pilgrimages, which leads to the question of ‘glocalisation’: even in remote locations in the Alps or Pyrenees, people were not isolated. By interacting with urban centres, they experienced colonial discourses, urban festivals, etc. Individuals therefore did not only ‘bricole’ new votives and rituals for pre-existing cult places, but Iron Age sites changed meaning due to people’s experiences and the changing Roman settlement structures.

 Wilderness, heavy places, and storytelling 
Anna Collar – University of Southampton

This paper explores the idea of Roman sacred landscapes and sanctuaries as part of a divine natural world: with both wilderness and cultivation thrumming with gods, monsters, ghosts and manes. Within this powerfully numinous understanding of their world, most of which is lost to us today—both in evidence and in our own capacity to imagine—sanctuaries are reminders of the presence and insistence of the spiritual in the pre-Christian Mediterranean. Sanctuaries can be usefully understood as ‘heavy places’ in the landscapes: knots in time of actions, emotions, experiences and stories. Sanctuaries help to show us how people in the past structured their lives and drew out meaning, created order and found safety in a blizzard of incomprehension about the mysterious, and sometimes dangerous, wild forces of the natural world around. Sanctuaries are places which make sense amidst voids—both of our own archaeological and historical knowledge, but also of voids contemporary to the people that held them sacred. How might we explore these conceptualisations of the spiritual and the natural world in the Roman period? An embodied, phenomenological exploration of the archaeological landscapes, material and narratives of Roman sanctuaries may enable us to draw out the threads of memory, meaning, and emotions that constitute sacred place and spiritual encounters.

 Conceptualising landscapes and the sacred at Teffont
David Roberts – Cardiff University

Over ten years of fieldwork at Teffont, Wiltshire, have provided a wide range of evidence for activity at, and surrounding, a large ridgetop shrine complex. This paper explores the viability of the concept of a sacred landscape for understanding lived experiences of this place in the Roman period. Wealth, monumentality and structured deposition are clearly articulated at and around the shrine complex, but in highly contingent forms, drawing closely on local and regional secular contexts of practice for meaning. Building on collaborative discussions with the project's team of specialists, this paper will argue that the sacred and profane are so deeply entangled at this site that alternative interpretive frameworks to the sacred landscape may provide richer understandings of belief and lifeways in the Roman period.

Investigating concepts of sacred landscapes on and beyond the northern frontier 
Martin Goldberg – National Museums Scotland        
Fraser Hunter – National Museums Scotland

Concepts of sacred landscapes in the military zone are often dominated by altars and the rather rarer ritual architecture, but many expressions of belief lacked or avoided such an obvious visual presence. In this paper we consider southern and eastern Scotland, an area that saw a complex and shifting relation with the Roman world, in terms of its hoards and related deliberate deposits in the Roman Iron Age. Can we see meaningful patterns in landscape setting and material content of such hoards? Does a comparison with the frontier zone around Hadrian’s Wall, which saw longer-term permanent military settlement, reveal whether there were differences in perceptions of sacred landscapes between the military community and the local Iron Age populations? Were practices and locations shared, adopted, adapted, or kept deliberately separate? This paper will take a large-scale and long-term comparative view of deposition in this area.

 Sacred rivers? New approaches to Roman objects near bridges 
Eckhard Deschler-Erb – Universität zu Köln        Hella Eckardt – University of Reading
Ferdinand Heimerl – Universität Trier            Stefanie Hoss – Universität zu Köln 
Philippa Walton – University of Reading

Rivers are major features in ancient and modern landscapes, and often become loci for deposition. Unfortunately in many cases it is difficult to disentangle ritual offerings from rubbish disposal, with German and British scholars typically employing different theoretical approaches. Many German scholars favour ‘rational’ explanations for river finds (such as rubbish disposal, accidental loss, floodwater, shipwrecks), while British archaeologists tend to argue for votive deposition (Snodgrass 2006). Previous analyses have focused on only selected objects, with the bulk of the finds assemblage ignored. This paper explores quantitative and qualitative methods to attempt a more nuanced analysis, using two case studies (Piercebridge, UK and Trier, Germany) where large artefact assemblages have been recovered near major Roman bridges. We will explore the interpretative challenges posed by the nature of artefact recovery from riverbeds and assess what they reveal about Roman identities and the nature of religious practice. We will also examine the histories of those who recovered the artefacts. How has their involvement affected the interpretation of the site and what is their impact of their recovery processes?  

Spatiality of the Worship of the Gods: Sacred Landscape of Palmyra and Palmyrena 
Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider – Uniwersytet Wrocławski

This paper orients on the geographical aspect of the places of cult of deities worshipped in Palmyra and the villages located in the near surroundings, described under the term Palmyrena. Through the analysis of the geographical features like mountains, wadis, springs, arid zones and oasis within the urban and rural spaces, we will look at the deities worshipped by the people within the city as outside in the “rural” zone. Are these two zones complementary or they present completely nonmatching religiospaces? Do we meet same deities there? Furthermore, what can we say about the people seen in Palmyra and in Palmyrena? Do we see the religion of the nomads and the passers-by? What do the sanctuaries in both places look like? Finally, what is the role of Palmyra in the aspect of the cult of the deities? Is the region described as Palmyrena religiously independent or is there any influence and impact from the city? These are the questions which are posed in this presentation.

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