AIA-3I: Reconsidering Ritual Agency and Depositional Processes in Greek Sacred Contexts (Colloquium)

Organizers

Andrew Ward, Emory University; and Amanda C. Ball, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Discussants

Michael Laughy, Washington and Lee University

Overview Statement

In recent decades, inclusive definitions of ritual and the depositional patterns by which they are recognized in the archaeological record have allowed for the appreciation of rituality in a broader range of contexts across the Greek Mediterranean. Yet, the conceptual distinctions differentiating a “structured” ritual deposit from “practical” practices like construction fill and/or refuse disposal, and the resultant frameworks employed by field archaeologists, continue to limit a full appreciation of the polythetic ritual activities associated with events like construction, consecration, abandonment, and the iterative disposal of sacred trash and other processes within sanctuaries. During such activities, the line between the functional and the meaningful may not have been as clear to the ancient actor as the typical excavation report presents.

This panel brings into discussion scholars whose work examines or reexamines deposits in sacred contexts that may be understood as curated and meaningful actions representative of a community’s present and past. After a short introduction by the organizers, the first paper presents a synthetic view of the meaningfulness of deposits containing material associated with dining, drawing on Aegean contexts. The following two papers turn to colonial contexts in Thrace and Sicily, where fills interpreted as passive containers of sacred trash or purely functional construction activities may well instead represent emplacement processes by immigrant communities finding their footing in foreign lands. The next two papers consider mainland traditions that entailed the careful curation of well-studied classes of material—kouroi and terracotta masks—within structured and seemingly unstructured depositions; these curating actions may be understood as reframing networks of cultural significance and emphasizing connections to the past, real or imagined. The final paper turns to deposits associated with construction, and how ritual activity attested in such contexts suggests that the boundaries between state and domestic cult must be blurred.

While varied in scope, these papers demonstrate the instability of many of the criteria used to demarcate the ritually meaningful from the functional in the archaeological record of Greek sacred space. Drawing on a range of anthropological and sociological theories regarding space and place, this panel seeks to emphasize the merits in revisiting excavation documentation from past projects to develop the archaeology of classical ritual. These studies, from authors that include students and well-established scholars, look beyond the purely processual interpretations of the archaeological record to reach for an understanding of religion and identity as being rooted in the very foundations of sacred space.