Alejandro G. Sinner / Víctor Revilla Calvo (eds.): Religious Dynamics in a Microcontinent. Review by José Carlos López Gómez (original) (raw)
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Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017
Rural cults are an aspect of the religion and culture of Roman Hispania that it is especially difficult to analyze given the paucity of epigraphic and archaeological evidence. This is quite a recent area of research; in addition, we are dealing with often modest religious practices that are difficult to identify in the archaeological record. Particularly problematic is the lack of information regarding cult places, despite the contribution made by some pioneering studies; yet the main problem has been the dominance of a paradigm that defines rural religion as a marginal space for social life, one that followed its own evolutionary rhythm influenced by a resistance to change. According to this paradigm, rural cults seem to comprise an unsystematic accumulation of traditional ritual practices whose preferred sphere of action would have been private.
Fenwick, C.; Wiggins, M. & Wythe, D. (Eds.): TRAC 2007. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (UCL and Birbeck College, University of London), 29 March-1 April 2007), 1-14. , 2008
This paper examines the use of prehistoric monuments in southern Iberian in Roman times. Firstly, a number of well-documented cases are described, discussing the specific circumstances of each of them (chronology, funerary ritual, spatial location, etc.). Secondly, an interpretation of the different ideological and social meanings that the utilisation of old megalithic monuments might have had for the communities of Roman Iberia.
Religious Dynamics in a Microcontinent: Cult Places, Identities, and Cultural Change in Hispania
Brepols: Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Series, 2022
The Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula, a land already inhabited by peoples who were characterized by cultural, ethnic, and social diversity, was one of the longest and most complex colonial processes to have occurred in the Roman world. Different political entities saw integration and interaction taking place at different speeds and via different mechanisms, and these differences had a profound impact on the development of religious dynamics and cultural change across the peninsula. This edited volume draws together contributions from a number of experts in the field in order to deepen our understanding of religious phenomena in Hispania — in particular cult, rituals, mechanisms, and spaces — and in doing so, to offer new insights into processes of cultural and social change, and the impact of conquest and colonialism. The chapters gathered here identify how forms of religious interaction occurred at different levels and scales, and explore the ways in which religion and religious practices underpinned the construction, development, and renegotiation of different identities. Through this approach they shed important light on the crucial role of cultic practices in defining cultural and social identity as Iberia’s provincial communities were drawn into the Roman world.
In the last decade, archaeologists investigating European prehistory have begun to understand the dimension of "materialised memory" that is often embodied in funerary and ritual sites and landscapes . This has opened the way to innovative research dealing with, for example, cultural memory, genealogies, manipulation of the past for ideological purposes and the definition of cultural identities. People select elements from the past according to the needs of the present, so that the past becomes subsumed, dominated, conquered or dismantled (van Dyke and Alcock, 2003: 3).