The Masks of Orthia and Ritual Ontology (20 min)

Presenters

Savannah Marquardt, Yale University

Abstracts

What are the masks of Orthia? One answer is easy—they are a collection of archaic terracottas more or less in the shape of a human face, found in deposits near the temple of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. But further investigation into the ontological status of these objects merely opens more questions. Are they material memories of a ritual drama? Or perhaps the echo of Near Eastern mythology, transliterated into Greek grotesques? Most answers have relied on iconographic identification of the faces represented, viewing the masks as individual objects to be identified and taxonomized. Treating the masks as individual specimens or as illustrations of a lost myth ignores the only archaeological evidence we have regarding the actual life of these objects—their deposition.

This paper argues that a revisitation of their depositional contexts as recorded in the early twentieth-century excavation records suggest that masks’ function is intimately linked to the architecture of the temple, a fact with major ramifications for considering their collective display. Thus I shift the focus from viewing the Orthia masks as specimens to be taxonomized or iconography to be decoded, to viewing them as a collective assemblage. In doing so, I consider agency not from the perspective of the human dedicant, but instead through the lens of ecological thought, drawing inspiration from indigenous relational ontologies that make room for the participation of the more-than-human in ritual activity.

Ritual has the potential to alter ontology, to fundamentally shift a means of being in the world. Can returning to the masks’ deposition allow the material record to announce its own understanding of sacred ontology?