Introduction, in A. G. SINNER, V. REVILLA CALVO (eds.), Religious Dynamics in a Microcontinent: Cult Places, Identities and Cultural Change in Hispania (original) (raw)
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Ausgabe 24 (2024), Nr. 1
The book under review is the first volume in the Archaeology of the Mediterranean World series. It includes twelve essays on Roman religion in Hispania in its various cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious contexts. The book is divided into two parts: the first, Rituals in context: Spaces, Scenarios and Landscapes, explores major topics such as the spatial organization of cult spaces, the forms of religious expression of the devotees, and how these sacred places served to promote a sense of community. Grau opens this section analysing the processes of religious transformation in the sanctuaries of Iberian communities in the eastern peninsula between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. He discusses how the conquest led to territorial restructuring and a reinvention of ritual practices, but he also identifies strong local reminiscences in the continuity of temples as markers of the symbolic landscape and in the regional variations of votive offerings. Grau argues that local communities could construct their "religious landscapes" and collective memory based on
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.
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.
Springer eBooks, 2013
In 2013, Springer published a series of texts reunited under the name of 'Religion and Place. Landscape, Politics and Piety'. The editors, Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong and Elisabeth Olson, all of them renowned scholars in the field of geographic studies, gathered another twelve ones, belonging to the Anglophonic cultural and linguistic culture (with one exception, N. Luz from Israel). Obvious from the very beginning is the fact that the editors were not only concerned with the attempt to reach diversity and complexity through the studies reunited under their coordination, but especially a certain geographical equity among the 'locative' distribution of themes. Despite the geographic diversity, Europe, Middle East, South Africa or South America face in a proper manner the tensions implied by religion and religious beliefs and act in social-political contexts. Structured in eleven chapters, introduction and index section, the 222 pages of the book I hereby treat presents a noteworthy collection through the diversity of approaches of the nowadays religions and their new or traditional topoi. Moreover, despite the diversity, all the texts possess a certain common noyauthe geography of religion. It would most certainly be a mistake to neglect the fact that all the scholars involved in this collective editorial project are affiliated to departments of Geography. This apparently insignificant detail offers a valuable key to understand the core of this book and the main theoretical domain to which they are affiliated. In my opinion, the reader does not witness a mere collection of studies on the religious life and practices. It is, in fact, about the inextricable relation between religion and space. In this context, the space should not be interpreted in its decorative or 'objective' meaning, but especially as the social, political and spiritual context in which the human life is organized. The methodological architecture of the eleven studies presented on this editorial occasion reveals its particularities. The reader will appreciate the methodological composition between the classical approach of certain domains and the instruments used in producing the scientific 'offspring'. It is rather common in treating subjects such as religion, secularization, sacralization, expressions of religiosity, spirituality and so on, to pursue qualitative analysis, gravitating around theoretical approaches. Instead, the scholars construct
The change in worship of polytheistic societies or the change of faith in the monotheistic ones, is a phenomenon studied by specialists of different historical, archaeological, anthropological or historical-religious disciplines, but never seen in a multidisciplinary perspective as a unitary phenomenon. By studying the interactions between people and trying to identify and describe the elements of exchange and knowledge of the Other, Alteritas now wants – with this miscellanea – to deal with a religious phenomenon that involves both people and places, both the modern and the ancient world. Contributions of approaches from archaeology, social sciences, history, anthropology, religious studies of different historical periods demonstrate reflection and various disciplinary approach on the subject.
L. Bombardieri, A. D’Agostino, G. Guarducci, V. Orsi and S. Valentini (eds.), 2013: SOMA 2012 Identity and Connectivity Proceedings of the 16th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology (Florence, 1–3 March 2012), vol. II, BAR International Series 2581 (II), Archaeopress, Oxford, 1001-1009.
Domestic cult in the Roman provinces Baetica and Tarraconensis can be apparently split in two periods: before the Era both indigenous and Roman evidences of domestic cult are found, while after the Era they are mostly Roman in their form. However, some local traditions, such as domestic child burials and votive deposits are still found. The material culture suggests that, there was a transitional period of coexistence and mixing of traditions and that, since approximately the second half of the 1st century BC, prevailed the Roman ones. But, in spite of the formal Roman appearance of the domestic cult, the election of certain gods, the high and early social value given to the shrines, the maintenance of certain local rites, etc., are related to ancient indigenous traditions, which don’t disappear but evolve and take new shapes due to the contact with new cultural realities, in a process of hybridization.