What difference did the Roman expansion make in the transformation of ancient Italy? With its conservative nature and abundant material evidence, the religious sphere represents a unique lens through which we can study this process over time and across different sites. Tracking the transformation of Italy as a result of Rome’s expansion, this book explores the issue of Romanization and sheds light on the different processes of adaptation that occurred during the Roman conquest.
During the Middle and Late Republican periods, cult places dotted the Italian landscape, with many concentrated in the ancient region of Umbria. From the layout and location of these sanctuaries to the paraphernalia associated with their cult practices, the archaeological record suggests that a shift in the location, architecture, and ritual practices occurred after Rome’s progressive expansion in the region at the end of the fourth century BCE. However, this transformation doesn’t adhere to a singular, uniform pattern. Certain sanctuaries witnessed a decline in ritual practices, while others underwent substantial reconstruction, often acquiring their initial permanent architectural elements. Meanwhile, a few sites persisted in their pre-Roman setup without any evident alterations.
Although sanctuaries do not follow a single pattern with regard to their architecture and location, they seem to do so with votive assemblages. During the Roman period, the range of objects associated with cult practices at these sanctuaries expanded. Between the fourth and third centuries BCE, as the Roman presence in Umbria spread and became a permanent fixture in the area, the bronze figurines that characterize votive deposits of the archaic period noticeably decreased. In their stead, we find a wider array of offerings including black-slip pottery, coins, and, in particular, anatomical terracottas, which remain the most popular type of offering into the first century BCE.
While much has been written on the religious landscape of Central and Southern Italy (Lucania, Etruria, Samnium, and Latium), a comprehensive overview of the religious sphere of ancient Umbria before and after the Roman conquest is still missing. The limited scholarship on the topic has focused on individual sanctuaries and, in line with traditional approaches to Central Italian cult places, has largely considered Roman expansion as the cause of apparent changes in the use of Umbrian sanctuaries and in the composition of votive material.
In attempting to point out the limitations of this argument, this research investigates how the Roman conquest affected religious behavior in the region of Umbria and the role played by cult places and religious phenomena in the integration of the region into the broader Roman state in the last few centuries BCE; did the socio-economic and political role of cult places influence their pattern of change? In order to address these questions, my exploration of Umbrian sanctuaries begins in the archaic period (sixth–fourth centuries BCE) and ends in the early first century BCE, before all the inhabitants of the peninsula gained Roman citizenship and all Italy was enfranchised (with the exception of Transpadane Gaul, the area beyond the Po River).
A multi-scalar approach to Umbrian sanctuaries and their votive material is used here to evaluate the various contexts—historical, religious, political, and socio-cultural—in which the sanctuaries functioned. Theories on cultural interactions and ritual are employed to provide an interpretation of the repercussions of Roman expansion in the religious sphere of the region and to seek out the meaning behind the practice of dedicating figurative votive objects during the pre-Roman period. Both goals are essential for moving the discussion about cultural change and ritual tradition forward: in this region in particular, a prevalent trend in scholarship considers the period after the fourth century BCE as a moment of radical change in the religious life of local peoples due to the Rome’s occupation of the region and downplays the ritual practices of the Umbrian worshipers before this century. As a result, the use of sanctuaries during the fourth–first centuries BCE and the appearance of terracotta heads and anatomical votives are believed to be closely linked to the Roman cultural imposition on the religious sphere. My work explicitly tackles these assumptions, testing them against the hard evidence from Umbrian sanctuaries and their figurative votive offerings: I examine both those finds that have been published and displayed in local museums and those that have been, quite literally, left to molder in dusty boxes in the depots of museums and the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio dell’Umbria or have simply been lost and are only mentioned in archival and excavation reports.
This ample material has not been gathered together before, nor has it been brought to bear on questions of continuity and change. No work has been done to evaluate the change in the location, architecture, and ritual behaviors of the Italic sanctuaries during the Republican period, or their significance for Italic communities at a crucial historical moment: the aftermath of Roman expansion at the end of the fourth century BCE. Integration among topographical, architectural, and votive data from Umbrian sanctuaries and a focus on the region’s archaic and Roman social and political developments are the tools that enable my project to cast a new light and bring an altogether new approach to the study of the ancient religious landscape. As the following chapters will demonstrate, the change that happened in the religious sphere of the region has little to do with Roman influence and more with extant local customs, long-lived ritual practices, and contemporary socio-political events.
1 Chronology and Geographic Scope
In this study, I use the chronology of Italic religions outlined by Guy Bradley and Fay Glinister.1 Since Italic peoples were profoundly affected by Roman expansion and its aftermath, the historical period of Italic religion can be classified in connection to the three main stages of this process, which can be summarized in Table 1.1.
Table 1.1
Chronology of Italic religion
|
Archaic/classical period. I also refer to this period as pre-Roman. |
Sixth–fourth centuries BCE |
Appearance of the first significant evidence of Italic religion |
|
Hellenistic period. I also refer to this period as the Roman period or the Middle Republican period. |
Late fourth–early first century BCE |
Roman conquest and its aftermath: most Italic peoples were conquered by Rome and entered into alliances with the urbs. |
|
Late Republic |
91 BCE to 14 CE. |
Italy became largely homogenized with the Social War and the concession of full Roman citizenship. |
With respect to the geographic scope of this work, it is important to note that ancient Umbria embraced a larger territory than the modern region designated by the same name. The latter excludes the northern part of the Adriatic side of the Apennines (the modern regions of Le Marche and Emilia Romagna) and includes areas that were originally Etruscan, such as Perusia and Volsinii. As my study of Umbrian sanctuaries is closely dependent upon the permission of the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio dell’Umbria to analyze the material, I limit my investigation to the Umbrian sacred places that fall into the area of responsibility of this Soprintendenza (fig. 1.1).2 Excluded from my investigations are therefore the cult places that belong to the authority of the Soprintendenza Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio delle Marche and the Soprintendenza Archeologia dell’Emilia Romagna.
Figure 1
Modern Umbria (in red) and the location of the Umbrian sanctuaries analyzed in this book.
2 Outline of the Study
If we exclude the Introduction, this study consists of five chapters and three appendices.
Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical methods that provide a framework for my investigation. They include the most dominant and influential approaches that scholars have applied to the study of cultural change on the Italian peninsula following the Roman expansion, with particular attention to religious contexts. Moving from the general to the specific, I offer a detailed analysis of the way these topics have been dealt with in the geographical context of Umbria and highlight how the discussion falls behind the stimulating debate on cultural change in other areas of the peninsula.
After laying out these theoretical principles, Chapter 3 delves into the ways anthropologists and sociologists have approached the study of ritual and how archaeologists have looked at the physical evidence for ritual practices. There is a tendency in the scholarship to concentrate on the study of anatomical terracottas—and their alleged significance as a marker of the spread of Roman religious beliefs—and Etruscan religion, perhaps due to its importance for later Roman tradition, such as divination techniques. As a result of this overly narrow focus, little attention has been given to understanding the meaning of other types of votive depositions. Umbria is no exception to this trend. Here, the abundance of bronze votive figurines of the pre-Roman period has been used to assign socio-political meanings to Umbrian society, while the appearance of anatomical terracottas in the Roman period is seen as an indication that local religious customs had changed following the Roman conquest. Ultimately, approaching the study of this material from a different angle, namely the ritual meanings of their deposition, can allow us to engage with broader questions on how and why anatomical terracottas made their appearance towards the end of the fourth century BCE.
Chapter 4 places Umbrian sanctuaries in the broad geographical and historical context of the region, from the pre-Roman period to the Social War in the early first century BCE. Special attention is paid to the question of ethnicity and the dynamics of Roman expansionism. Following a close reading of the literary sources, traditional interpretations of the historical trajectories of the region have regarded the Umbrians as a cohesive ethnos and the middle centuries of Roman expansion (the third and second centuries BCE) as crucial to the political, social, and cultural changes that happened in the region. Recent studies on ethnicity and identity in the Mediterranean and the intricate dynamics of the interactions between Roman and local elites complicate these traditional interpretations of the process of Roman expansion. In this chapter, I highlight the archaeological and epigraphical evidence from Umbria that corroborates these new approaches and sheds light on the existence of both diverse local identities (rather than a single monolithic one) and of factionalism and personal agendas that members of the Umbrian elite could pursue in order to manipulate the Roman imperialistic machinery into working in their favor. This analysis provides a fundamental framework through which we can interpret the change that happened in the cult places of the region.
Chapter 5 introduces the archaeological record available for Umbrian sanctuary sites and traces their development between the sixth and the first centuries BCE. For each of them, I provide an overview of the topographical location, the architectural and spatial organization, and the votive material—published, unpublished, and archival objects—with particular attention paid to figurative votive offerings (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and anatomical offerings). These are further described at length and cataloged in the Appendices (1–3). The results of this analysis allow us to address crucial questions regarding central Italian sacred places: was the abandonment of cult places related to the laissez-faire policy of Rome? Is the presence of anatomical terracottas an indication of a change in the cult sphere that followed the spread of more homogenized religious beliefs? The artifactual evidence from Umbrian sanctuaries answers these questions and tells us a different story from the one generally discussed by scholars. It demonstrates, first, that sanctuaries continued to thrive into the Roman period regardless of their proximity to significant Roman religious centers, and second, that anatomical terracottas are hardly related to the Roman presence in the region, since the practice of dedicating anatomical votive offerings and terracotta heads was already widespread from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE. Once it is shown that one-way influence from Rome into Umbria is untenable, I focus on what the contextual analysis of sanctuaries and their votive objects can, in fact, reveal with respect to the broader patterns in cultural practices that spread through the region following the Roman expansion into the peninsula.
Drawing from the data analyzed and discussed in the previous section, in Chapter 6 I advance several hypotheses that account for the continuation of Umbrian sanctuaries during the Roman period and the apparent longevity of the ritual practice of dedicating anatomical objects. In doing so, I trace a macro-scale picture of the socio-economic and cultural trends visible in the region’s cult places from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. In the first section of the chapter, I focus on the function of sacred places from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE and use topographical data and information provided by the figurative votive offerings to argue that sanctuaries function in close connection with individual communities. Furthermore, I explore the possible meanings for the deposition of bronze figurines during this period and propose that it constituted a ritual of well-being for the individual as well as for the community. The second section considers the development of cult places after the Roman expansion. First, I analyze the change in ritual depositions and suggest that the adoption of terracottas needs to be considered as a new medium—advantageous both in technique and in fashion—used to express an already long-established practice. Second, I provide an interpretation of the decrease in ritual activities at certain sanctuaries and the monumentalization of other sanctuaries with Italic and Hellenistic architectural features. While the former appears to be connected to regional economic trends, the latter ties into the dynamics of interconnection and negotiation among Umbrian and Roman elites, who, for different reasons, had a shared interest in showing public munificence to pursue their civic and political goals. On the basis of this interpretation of the evidence, the model I propose to use to approach the topic of cultural change in the religious sphere does not leave much room for the imposition of one culture onto the local people; rather, I advocate for a theoretical framework of analysis which finds similarities with the Middle Ground theory first proposed by Richard White. This “space in between,” however, was not solely the one shared by Romans and the Umbrians but rather one that reflected and was informed by a complex network of dynamic relationships and associations that involved the broader Italic peninsula and the Mediterranean as a whole.
Three appendices conclude the book. In Appendix 1, the types of offerings that make up Umbrian votive deposits are described in detail, with a focus on their stylistic elements and, if available, the scholarly discussion of their interpretation. Appendix 2 is a tabulated catalog in the form of an Excel database. It collects all the votive figurines of Umbria, mostly unpublished, that I studied first-hand in the museums and depots of the region. Information regarding find spot, date, measurements, and chronological range is provided, followed by a bibliography (if present) and appropriate comparanda. Appendix 3 is a photo catalog of the figurative votive offerings discussed in Chapter 5.
On a final note, I hope that this work will also provide a useful method of investigation in other areas of research on Italic cult places, especially those that either have not yet been examined, such as the ones in Picenum, or are still discussed within the conventional framework of “Religious Romanization.” As the example of Umbria abundantly demonstrates, a careful analysis of the material evidence from sanctuaries has the potential to rewrite some of the basic assumptions of Roman cultural influence and to shed new light on local traditions, their persistence through time, and their adaptation to new socio-political events.
Bradley and Glinister 2013, 176.
Excluded from this map are the sanctuaries that have not yielded pre-Roman votive offerings, such as the important sanctuary of Villa Fidelia and the sanctuary at Iguvium Hortensis, for which the Soprintendenza did not grant me a study permit. Furthermore, I have not included isolated votive offerings whose provenance is lacking. These are published by Colonna 1987.