1 Introduction
In recent years, archaeologists have successfully applied new approaches to the investigation of rituals and their material remains and have made significant and novel contributions to the contextualization of ritual theory. There is a growing consensus among archaeologists that religion and religious practices are significant components of human culture and social life and should not be ignored in archaeological investigation. These developments in archaeology have led to new interpretations that have helped articulate the relationship between religious belief and practice and, further, to explore the materiality of religion in ancient life.
The discussion is organized into three parts. In the first and second parts, I review different approaches used by archaeologists to study religion and religious rituals and to understand the role that both play in shaping a community’s cultural identities. Within the discipline of archaeology, religion has often been treated as particularly impenetrable. As a consequence of deep-rooted aversions towards archaeological studies of religion, ritual has been used as a catch-all term for anything that archaeologists find to be odd and without immediate functional value. In the past thirty years, however, religion and religious rituals have become an essential topic within archaeological investigation. Building on anthropological and sociological understandings of religion, archaeologists have begun to address the material remains of religion. The archaeology of ancient ritual is now a dynamic and growing field that continues to generate numerous ongoing debates and areas of new research.
The third part considers how these material remains have been used to reconstruct ancient ritual through considerations of their continuity across time and their connection to social identity. This discussion highlights the limitations of the existing studies of central Italian votive offerings, which largely focus on anatomical terracottas as a proxy for the spread of Roman conquest. Scholars have given scant attention, however, to the ritual function of archaic votives and how it developed during the Roman period. The study of Umbrian votive figurines in particular has suffered from this narrowly focused interest and no attempts have been made to consider the ritual meaning of their deposition and how it may have varied over time. It is time for a new study of votive material.
2 Archaeology of Religion
In an influential article from 1954, Christopher Hawkes1 argued that “religious institution and spiritual life” represent the least appropriate venue for archaeological inquiry. In the years since, archeologists have been daunted by using religion as a lens of interpretive analysis. The reason why archaeologists have considered religion to be such an impenetrable realm for analysis lies in the alleged divide between religious belief and religious practice. These two domains have traditionally been carefully separated in archaeological investigations because archeologists viewed religion as primarily metaphysical and abstract, and, therefore, in clear contrast with the object of their study, the material world. The “New Archaeology” of the 1960s–1970s further strengthened this view, as it portrayed religion as epiphenomenal and downplayed its practical dimension, considering it “materially unidentifiable.”2
This tendency to view religion as abstract has also manifested in more recent discussions of the archaeology of religion. In his 2004 monograph, Timothy Insoll holds that religion is all-pervasive, informing and influencing even aspects of life that archaeologists have typically considered secular. Although Insoll emphasizes the all-encompassing nature of religion, he also stresses the difficulty of delving into its essence. In his view, the numinous character of religion “defies rationality” and thus represents an obstacle for archaeologists.
Despite this history of strict separation, in the last thirty years, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of religion have developed theories for understanding ancient religion and have paid progressively closer attention to the ways in which religious beliefs and practices are embodied and performed in social contexts and how broader cultural and political factors shape them. Their theoretical understandings of religion have formed the cornerstone of new archaeological approaches to both religion and ritual.3
Practice theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Ernst Bloch, and Catherine Bell advocate for the embeddedness of religion within human actions and emphasize the different ways that religion is present in people’s daily lives.4 Applying the ideas of Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, where ritual is considered a specific form of social practice that reproduces social relationships, Bell identifies ritual as a form of human action and as an active component of religious practice that creates and alters religious beliefs.5 Others emphasize ritual’s potential to foster social change and the effect that ritual has on the power relationships between participants.6
These approaches explicitly reject the structural approach that has traditionally dominated the discussions of religion.7 The structuralist perspective emphasizes the stability of religion as a long-lasting cultural phenomenon. According to this view, ritual is a form of human action that enacts religious principles and must be stable over time. This theory has been contested by, among others, practice theorists as being “ill-suited to the consideration of diachronic change.”8 Rather than focusing on the stability of ritual actions, practice theorists follow Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and highlight the experiential aspects of ritual and how it is continuously reconstructed and modified.9
So too, the cognitive approach also relates religious beliefs to practice and material culture. Cognitive theories analyze the relationship between the human mind/brain system and external reality. Anthropologists such as Merlin Donald, Robert McCauley, and Thomas Lawson emphasize the dialectic between surroundings and the mind, and they recognize external elements as crucial in cognitive development.10 In their foundational book, Rethinking Religion, McCauley and Lawson posit a unified theory that exemplifies the cognitive approach to religious ritual.11 According to these two authors, religious rituals are actions guided by the same cognitive system that guides everyday practice.
Despite minor divergences, both of these interpretative frameworks offer a significant contribution to archaeological studies by emphasizing that religion is not merely a spiritual phenomenon but is made manifest in the material world. Therefore, the construction of religious architecture, the offerings of objects to gods, and the performance of sacrifice all have the potential to leave material remains that archaeologists can study. As will become apparent in the next part of this chapter, these theories can be particularly applicable to archaeology.
Following the lead of anthropological and sociological studies, in the past ten years, archaeology has increasingly incorporated religion into its interpretative repertoire. Rather than focusing on religion’s unknowable and transcendental aspects, scholars have begun to shift their attention to materiality, agency, practice, memory, movement, and performance; in short, they have started to consider religion as centrally embedded in human actions. This recent emphasis on practice is critical for the archaeological study of religion. As Lars Fogelin has emphasized,12 religion is something that people do, and therefore it leaves material traces. Archaeologists, in turn, can examine these traces and, through careful research and investigation, reconstruct what people did and the religious ideology underlying those actions.
3 Archaeology of Ritual
The study of ritual is another field of inquiry that has been largely overlooked in archaeology. For a long time, archaeologists have grappled with the challenges of recognizing and understanding ancient rituals based on archaeological evidence. Explicit methodologies for reconstructing ancient rituals and religion have been mostly absent, with the belief that this was an unsuitable area for archaeological inquiry. The main reason for this neglect is the longstanding divide between human beliefs and social practices. Alongside religion, ritual has been considered immaterial (or intangible?), related to beliefs, transcendence, or the supernatural. As a result, archaeological data were regarded as insufficient to interpret ritual practices. As Ian Hodder points out,13 anything that archaeologists have found odd and without immediate functional value has been associated with ritual, leading to various definitions and interpretations of ritual practices.14
In recent years, however, the shift from belief to practice in anthropological and sociological studies on religion has positively affected archaeology. Archaeologists have made increased efforts to bridge the apparent divide between ancient rituals and archaeological data.15 As Bell observes, in the current scholarship on ancient rituals there seems to be a shared agreement to define ritual as a “set of crystallized” forms of human action, or set activities, that leave material traces in the archaeological record.16 Since archaeologists attempt reconstructions based on observed patterns, ritual is more likely to be tracked than many other activities.
Colin Renfrew first noted that the presence of repetitions and patterns in the archaeological record was characteristic of ritual. In his seminal work on the Bronze Age Cycladic shrine of Phylakopi, Renfrew attempts to systematize the archaeological identification of religious sites by providing a list of indicators of ritual that includes attention focusing (with place, equipment, and symbols), boundary zones, the presence of the deity, participation, and offerings.17 Although this checklist has attracted some criticism,18 it has substantially impacted subsequent work.
The attention given by anthropologists in recent years to a more practice-oriented understanding of religion has resulted in an increased focus on material evidence. More recent archaeological research places the primacy of ritual practice at the forefront, emphasizing the agency of humans and objects as well as ritual practices’ experiential and behavioral aspects.19 These studies are influenced by various theories, including Alfred Gell’s “object agency,” Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, and Hodder’s concept of “entanglement” between humans and things20 Material-based studies of ancient religion explore the embeddedness of religion in the material world in different ways.
Gell challenges the traditional dichotomy between people and objects by arguing that objects are not just mere reflections of human agency. Instead, he asserts that they are active devices that play a role in “securing the acquiescence of individuals in the network of functionalities in which they are enmeshed.” In short, artifacts are social agents in themselves. Similarly, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) considers the interactions that occur between humans and nonhuman actors. He maintains that people and things cannot be separated as they have a symmetrical relationship in which each affects the other. This proposition is not dissimilar to Karl Knappett’s argument that suggests that humans and objects have a relationship in which they “bring each other into being.”21
Unlike Latour, Hodder considers the relationship between things and humans to be asymmetrical because the dependencies that one can have on the other lead “to entrapments in particular pathways from which it is difficult to escape.”22 He holds that the materiality of things creates a set of dependencies between objects and people (entanglements), which he breaks down into four types: human-thing, thing-human, thing-thing, and human-human.
This “material turn” is part of a broad range of new approaches to archaeology that have been defined as relational or posthuman. These approaches challenge traditional notions of human exceptionalism and individual subjectivity and instead consider the agency and intentionality of objects. The aim is to move away from anthropocentric views of the world and towards a more holistic understanding of the relationships between people and things.23
Among recent practice-based approaches to archaeology, the work of Lynn Meskell, John Barrett, and Bill Sillar,24 who work on Egypt, Greece, and the Andes respectively, has been particularly influential. They emphasize that different objects—from human-made items to natural features of the landscape—have agency and intentionality that shape religious traditions. Likewise, Chris Gosden focuses on the replacement of Iron Age objects from southern Britain with Roman objects and analyzes how the objects’ form and style influenced people. He draws on Gell’s idea that objects have their own logic and that human behavior and thoughts may “take the shape suggested by the object, rather than objects simply manifesting pre-existing forms of thought.”25 These scholars observe the inseparability of beliefs and other internal cognitive or emotional experiences from material culture: objects express and shape symbolic meanings, identities, relationships, and perceptions. For these reasons, they argue that agency lies in the social relationship that people have with the material world and that material objects can have social identities. These approaches emphasize the posthuman tendency of decentering of the human: they enable us to understand the archaeological record as the visible materialization of the interdependence between objects and humans and challenge the limitations of modernist, western perspectives on the world.
The discussion of the centrality of change within ritual is a significant development in recent research. Scholars have emphasized the importance of understanding how rituals are subject to change through human agency and may change for reasons beyond human control. Additionally, research has shown that rituals change those who perform or observe them. The “Ritual Dynamics” project at Heidelberg University has contributed to this discourse by investigating the dynamics of ritual practices in various historical and contemporary cultures.26 The project’s focus on the performative character of ritual emphasizes the creativity and meaning-creating character of ritual, and its case studies, ranging from modern and ancient Asia to the Near East, illustrate the centrality of change in ritual practice. The project’s findings challenge the notion that rituals are stereotyped and invariant events and highlight the significance of change within and through rituals.
The recent collection of papers, Ritual Dynamics in the Ancient Mediterranean: Agency, Emotion, Gender, Representation, edited by Angelos Chaniotis, clearly illustrates the application of practice theory in archaeology as emphasized by the “Ritual Dynamics” project and exemplifies the latest trends in the study of ritual performances in the Ancient Mediterranean.27 The contributors to the volume utilize diverse source material to identify and explain evidence of changes in the Mediterranean (Egypt, Greece, Northern Italy, North Africa, and the Roman East) through the lens of agency, emotion, gender, and representation. For example, Ioanna Patera’s account of modifications over time in Eleusinian rites and Eftychia Stavrianopoulou’s study of how Greek written text codified practice both focus on tradition invoked as a rationale for change.28 In the case of Eleusis, Chianotis notes that many innovations in Greek rituals affected the staging and aesthetics of the ritual actions rather than of the essential form of the ritual that, instead, remains unchanged. Similarly, scholars such as Barbara Mills and William Walker, and Ruth Van Dyke and Susan Alcock, have emphasized the dynamic aspects of ritual.29 Although specific rituals may remain the same over long periods, their meaning for society is constantly re-contextualized.
Practice theory elucidates how the ritual experience has the potential to reaffirm, create, or challenge the dominant social order.30 Research often focuses on ritual symbolism and the materialization of ritual symbols. Once materialized, symbolic objects can be controlled and manipulated by people in order to achieve specific aims. Elizabeth DeMarrais and John Robb productively apply these insights in their examination of how the elite could limit access to material symbols such as icons, rituals, monuments, and written text or change their underlying meaning.31 Jerry Moore and Lars Fogelin, among others, employ a practice approach more focused on how people experienced ritual in the past.32 They emphasize the ways in which different religious architectural layouts promoted different experiences that either served the interests of authority or resistance to authority.
These practice-based perspectives in the archaeology of ritual emphasize the effects of ritual on the social relations between ritual participants and focus on how ritual change over time informs and reflects the development of those relationships. As such, practice approaches downplay the importance of symbolism in the study of ancient rituals and favor the analysis of the use of symbols and the goals of the people who deployed them.
Against these formulations that consider ritual to be a “transformative performance,”33 scholars who support a structuralist perspective emphasize the stability of religion.34 They view it as a long-lasting, static cultural phenomenon and stress its anachronistic and invariant elements. Cultural materialists such as Roy Rappaport and Elizabeth Sobel also hold onto the stability of religion and argue that ritual actions have the function of retaining and passing down social information over time35
As noted by Lars Fogelin,36 few archaeologists follow either the practice-oriented or the structural approach to the archaeology of ritual. More typically, they employ insights from both perspectives in their research without overcoming the contradictions that the two perspectives pose. Similarly, Insoll points out that the current problem that archaeologists face is to find a balance between understanding ritual as subject to change and the existence of an underlying core of stability in practice and belief concerning ritual.37
As this discussion has shown, religion and ritual are now far from being tangential to archaeological research. In the past few years, scholars have questioned the impenetrability of religion, and new research questions and approaches have opened new perspectives for the development of the field of the archaeology of religion. Following the lead of sociological and anthropological studies, archaeologists are paying increasing attention to material culture as a source to reconstruct ritual and cult practices. A proliferation of new studies on the archaeology of ancient religion examine the complex interactions between humans and objects, their agency, and the role of religion in society. As scholars focus on the agency of objects and participants in a ritual in their specific social, local, and historical context, they are aware that the meaning of ritual is far from static, but rather can change over time. As archeologists begin to engage with this material, they also use new approaches to understand it, such as the entanglement between human and object agencies, religion as a causal force for social change, and change and re-contextualization of religious rituals. These ongoing investigations contribute to making the archaeology of religion and ritual a fundamental component in debates over the interactions and interrelationships between individuals, communities, and structures of power.
4 Votive Religion
In societies accustomed to giving gifts to transcendent beings for supernatural returns, such as Italic and Roman societies, votive offerings represent the most ubiquitous evidence of ritual activity.38 Any object could be vowed, but generally, votives consisted of perishable items (grains and plants, milk, wine, honey, cakes); personal items (toys, amulets, jewelry); practical items (fish hooks, loom weights, tools, utensils, incense burners); statuettes/statues (gods, men, women, swaddled babies, animals); body parts (miniaturized models of every description); altars, cippi, and bases; ceramic items (miniaturized pottery, lamps, temple models); and coins. These offerings are both abundant and ubiquitous. As indicated by Ingrid Edlund-Berry’s research on votive depositions at Etruscan sanctuaries, people seeking or receiving the god’s attention would leave votive offerings on display in a wide range of settings, including urban, rural, extramural, extra-urban, spring, lake, mountain, cave, state, and private cults.39
The quantity and variety of votive types have inspired the term “votive religion,” since votives are concrete and provide long-lasting evidence for the principle of reciprocity.40 As Walter Burkert has emphasized, votive offerings embody the principle of exchangeability—do ut des (I give so that you will give)—that granted divine aid in exchange for the donor’s vow.41 As such, they are considered visible expressions of the interaction and communication between the donors and the deities. Thus, the beliefs and motives of the worshiper must have played an essential role in the selection of the dedication. The function of votive offerings as gifts that bind together an individual and the gods makes this class of material a vital tool for exploring cultural and ritual dynamics in ancient societies. First, votive offerings illuminate the complex relationship between people and things and between people and gods.42 Second, recent publications demonstrate that votive offerings can provide valuable information for reconstructing aspects of ancient economies,43 social and political structures,44 and ritual practices.45
Although the relevance of votive religion in Greek and Roman contexts has been recognized,46 the study of votive offerings has long been neglected by archaeologists. Robin Osborne points out a number of reasons for this oversight.47 Firstly, archaeologists have devoted their attention primarily to the classification of objects rather than assemblages. The consequence of this predilection for object types, which are believed to provide chronological information, is that we have overlooked the potential of artifacts’ assemblages to understand ritual practices. Secondly, it can be difficult to differentiate between objects that have been dedicated and those that have been simply discarded, one of the primary complications in the interpretation of ritual in the archaeological record.48 Similarly challenging is the question of how much votive material is needed to classify a site as a ritual space and whether a few objects are sufficient to classify a site within the corpus of sacred spaces. Finally, Osborne rightly points out the hesitance among scholars in agreeing on one term to refer to dedicated objects. These objects are variously called dedications, offerings, votives, hoards, or simply deposits, depending on what feature of the object the writer wants to emphasize the most (permanence of the gift/action of giving/connection with prior vow/quantity/circumstances of the act of depositing).49
Minoan and archaic Greek votive practices are particularly prominent in studying Mediterranean religion and its connection with culture, politics, and society. Since the beginning of archaeological work on Crete in the nineteenth century, archaeologists have nurtured a fascination for the origin of ritual practices and belief systems in the Aegean, and their connections to contemporaneous socio-political phenomena. In the past thirty years, works such as Renfrew’s The Archaeology of Cult and Warren’s Minoan Religion as Ritual Action have pioneered new approaches to performance and ritual action, with a specific focus on material culture.50 Both authors underscore the importance of performance in ritual actions and of votive (as well as iconographic) material to reconstruct religious practices.
Experiential and cognitive approaches have been applied to Minoan archaeology with the result that votive material is used to reconstruct how people experienced rituals. In her dissertation on mountain peak sanctuaries, Elissa Faro explores the material culture in the ritual spaces of the island and their meaning within the network of the Minoan ritual landscape. She analyzes assemblages from extra-urban and urban ritual spaces and clarifies that their differences provide evidence for distinct ritual practices. Moreover, she demonstrates that votive assemblages changed over time according to the specific needs of the elite who sought to redefine their status in the new power structure of the Neopalatial period.51 Similarly, Camilla Briault studies votive deposits from Minoan sacred places. She concludes that the interpretation of data patterning is a productive way to approach ritual in the Bronze Age Aegean.52
The recent publication Cult Material: From Archaeological Deposits to Interpretation of Early Greek Religion further elaborates on the theory and practice of interpreting cult and religion, with particular attention paid to votive deposits in their archaeological context.53 The contributors to this volume emphasize the role of votive deposits in monitoring processes of change and transformation. Indeed, one of their central arguments is that the analysis of cult places using archaeological methods enables us to observe shifts in structural patterns that reflect on ritual behavior and social agency.
Emma-Jayne Graham’s study of the anatomical votives from Fregellae and Punta della Vipera in Latium emphasizes the multivalent nature of anatomical votives and focuses on how these objects impacted the lives of their worshipers.54 She argues that anatomical votives not only created permanent relationships between humans and the gods but also made manifest the power of the gods in the real world. These material remains thus shed light on “how people conceptualized, performed, and constructed their knowledge of the gods.”55 Pursuing this line of research even further, in her recent monograph, she uses a method called new materialism to explore how the process of reassembling the material remains of religious practices and beliefs can help us to better understand the lived experience of ancient religion.56
While Graham’s study explores the impact of anatomical votives on worshipers in Latium, Battiloro’s work on Lucanian sanctuaries sheds light on the ritual performances associated with votive offerings in southern Italy.57 Battiloro’s focus on the rituals associated with votives sets her research apart from most of the work on Italic religion, which treats votive deposits mainly in terms of their socio-political meaning and relationship to the Roman conquest. Together, Graham’s and Battiloro’s studies contribute to a growing body of research that emphasizes the importance of analyzing votive deposits in their archaeological and ritual contexts to appreciate the diverse ways in which ancient people interacted with their gods.
4.1 Votive Offerings in Central Italy
For decades, the study of votives in central Italy has suffered from a narrow scholarly focus on anatomical terracottas and the rituals and beliefs of the Etruscans. The current discourse on votive offerings in this area centers around the vast number of votive terracotta deposits in Etruscan and Italic societies dedicated between the late fourth and first centuries BCE. Scholars have primarily focused on this material to track “Romanization,” following Torelli’s 1973 argument that the distribution of these objects was linked to Rome and the foundation of Latin colonies. Notwithstanding the attempts to deconstruct the ideological aspect of anatomical terracottas, the paradigm of Romanization is still widespread in the studies of ancient votives, as demonstrated by de Cazanove’s paper in Tesse Stek and Gert-Jan Burgers’ recent publication.58 This scholarly insistence that anatomical votives are a sign of Roman cultural influence overly simplifies the interactions between Romans and locals and overlooks other categories of ancient Italic votive offerings.
As for the use of votives as a means to reconstruct ancient ritual practices in central Italy, research has been sporadic and focused almost entirely on the region of Etruria. Much ink has been spilled over the “most religious of men,”59 and recent work considers the potential of votive offerings to shed light on Etruscan religious beliefs and practices. The collection of papers in the volume edited by Nancy de Grummond and Ingrid Edlund-Berry, The Archaeology of Sanctuaries and Ritual in Etruria, illustrates the recent trends in the study of Etruscan votive religion.60 De Grummond’s contribution, for example, encourages archaeologists to look carefully for variation in votive contexts and to consider the ritual implications of broken or misshapen objects in sanctuary contexts.61 Helen Nagy has also found that comparative approaches shed new light on Etruscan rituals. By comparing votive terracottas from Veii and Cerveteri, she prompts further questions about male and female participation in ritual and raises the possibility that not only certain rituals but also specific ritual spaces were gendered in the ancient landscape.62
4.2 Votive Offerings in Ancient Umbria
More than two thousand figurative votive offerings representing bronze worshipers, warriors, animals, and anatomical parts and heads have been retrieved from the sanctuaries of ancient Umbria. While Guy Bradley acknowledges the importance of this material in providing insight into Umbrian religion, scholars have largely overlooked it. With only a few site-specific catalogs available, the topic is mostly confined to rare appearances in broad discussions on Italic religions. One issue with the limited research that has been done is that it tends to focus on the socio-political meaning of the votives and on anatomical terracottas as markers of the “Romanization” process brought about by Rome’s expansion. As a consequence, the ritual significance of dedicating votive objects in the region and how it changed from the third to the first century BCE has received little attention.
Studies of the figurative votive offerings from the region have been influenced by the seminal work of Giovanni Colonna, entitled Bronzi votivi Umbro-Sabellici a figura umana. Colonna categorizes pre-Roman bronze votive figurines into groups according to their stylistic affinities and labels the groups with one of their main find sites, even if this is not always their likely place of manufacture.63 Although individual workshops are difficult to identify, the fact that some types recur in higher proportion in specific sanctuaries of the region has led him to hypothesize that the bronze figurines were produced by local workshops that could travel and sell their products across Umbria and in the neighboring regions. The votive types classified by Colonna go from a low level of sophistication, with figurines of the so-called “Esquiline Group,” “Amelia Group,” and “Nocera Umbra Group,” to the stylistically more sophisticated figures of the “Foligno Group.”64 Colonna identifies the figures of warriors as the most common type and calls them “Mars in Assault.”65 Moreover, he recognizes some figures as oranti, or worshipers, and others as Hercules, walking figures, and dancers; besides these, but not discussed by Colonna, figurative votive offerings of the pre-Roman period include simple representations of parts of the body, small warrior crests, and animals, including pigs, oxen, goats, and sheep.
Since Colonna’s study, little research has been done on Umbrian votive bronzes that goes beyond his classification. Even if we include published catalogs of Umbrian bronzes,66 which are purely lists of objects, scholars studying votive bronzes in the region have made no attempts to interpret the nature of the ritual associated with the votives that go beyond the traditional association between the presence of votive body parts and salutary cults.67 The trend among scholars in the past years has been to confer socio-cultural meaning upon bronze figurines or note their presence in the Roman period alongside other types of votives and assess the presence of traditions “salvaguardate dalla romanizzazione.”68
The likelihood that bronze figurines were publicly displayed in Umbrian sanctuaries has led scholars to understand these votives as an ostentatious means by which the donors competed within the context of sanctuaries. Laura Bonomi-Ponzi, for example, interprets the subject matter of the figurines of domestic animals and warriors as a representation of the basis of the aristocratic power, while Bradley understands the more sophisticated types of bronzes as a sign of the active presence of Umbrian elites in the sanctuaries.69 By the same token, Luana Cenciaioli interprets the presence of schematic and straightforward figurines as markers that people from outside the social elite frequented the sanctuaries.70
Scholars focusing primarily on the representation of animals and warriors favor an interpretation that sees the sanctuaries as the foci of the pastoral population interested in warfare. Monacchi, for example, has suggested that the more schematic bronzes of animals are offerings of thanks for the protection of the donor’s herd and that they show Umbrian society’s interest in stock-raising.71 Along similar lines, Bradley argues that the “Mars in assault” types ought to be interpreted as a manifestation of an agricultural and pastoral community while the worshiper types were representations of the donors.72 According to these authors, the pastoral lifestyle of the pilgrims reflected in the type of bronzes is further indicated by the high altitude of several Umbrian sanctuaries.
These socio-economic interpretations are open to debate as most archaeological records from Umbrian cult places show no indication of the social classes involved in the cult.73 This holds true in particular for votive figurines. While the refinement of the figurines, their size, and their manufacture may indicate the level of investment put into the dedication,74 in the absence of any inscription there is no direct or concrete indication of the wealth of the person who bought and donated a given votive. A refined object is not necessarily the dedication of an elite member of a high social class. It may instead represent a significant investment of money by a lower-class person who cared particularly for their dedication to the god or desired to be self-represented in the religious sphere through the offering, for example, of a well-refined warrior figurine. If we look at the more schematic figurines, it is also possible, as Bradley wisely suggests,75 that they were the dedications of elite members who left many votives each. Unlike grave goods, which point to the presence of elite members,76 individual offerings dedicated in sacred spaces could result from the noticeable economic effort of less affluent and elite individuals. It seems, therefore, unsound to make inferences about the social status of the worshipers of Umbrian sanctuaries and to identify them based strictly on iconography. This type of analysis may indicate the investment made in the practice of dedicating offerings, but any interpretation of the donor’s social class remains pure speculation.
By attempting to shed some light on the socio-economical composition of Umbrian communities, previous works on Umbrian bronze votive figurines have overlooked what ritual practice was associated with them. The only effort to address the ritual aspect of Umbrian cult places is made by Stoddart, when he discusses the results of the Gubbio Project.77 He addresses the peak sanctuary of Monte Ansciano and its votive deposits in order to hypothesize the ritual landscape present at Gubbio in the archaic period. Stoddart points to the simplicity of the ritual enclosure as suggesting a small scale of investment and low-key participation. However, he does not evaluate the ritual meaning of the deposition of the objects dedicated in the enclosure.
Between the fourth and third centuries, as the Roman presence in Umbria spread and became a permanent fixture, the bronze figurines that characterize votive deposits of the archaic period noticeably decreased. We find a more extensive array of votives in their stead, including coins, miniature pottery, balsamaria, and figurative votive offerings. The latter consists primarily of bronze figurines of worshipers of the so-called Hellenistic worshiper type—female and male with the head wrapped by a wreath of vine leaves or diadem, a patera in the right hand and acerra in the left—and anatomical terracottas, an offering which began to fade in popularity in the first century BCE.
Although, as noted in the previous chapter, Glinister and Gentili highlight that the exponential increase in the available material does not validate the widespread view that connects anatomical votives to the Roman conquest, the social perspective has also left its mark on the studies on these votives. Scholars have used anatomical terracottas in Umbria to draw simple conclusions about the Romanization of the area or the influence of Roman ritual customs on local ones.78 Conversely, their absence or paucity has been connected to concepts such as “resistance” and “safeguarding of local traditions.” As for the Hellenistic worshiper type, given their popularity, they are simply defined as typical of the Etrusco-Italic koine of the Hellenistic period.79
5 Conclusions
In recent times, there has been a renewed interest in the archaeological study of religion due to a recognition of a gap in our understanding of symbolic behavior. Object-oriented approaches that focus on physical evidence for ritual practices have been identified as important developments in this area. While some publications have discussed the potential of this approach, there is still a lack of work on votive religion in central Italy. In particular, the ritual significance of the deposition of offerings in Umbria has been overlooked in favor of anatomical terracottas and Etruscan rituals and beliefs.
Little attention has been given to the ritual meaning of dedicating votive objects in Umbria and how it changed from the third to the first century BCE. This lack of interest has prevented archaeologists from examining the role of these material objects in the associated ritual. Recognizing this connection is critical to understanding the enactment and transformation of the rituals performed in ancient Umbrian sanctuaries.
To address broader research questions, it is necessary to abandon the traditional socio-economic approach to studying Umbrian votive offerings and find evidence to refute the conventional view of anatomical terracottas as proof of “religious Romanization” throughout the peninsula. Only then can we use these and other Umbrian figurines to analyze the transformation of ritual practices from the third to the first century BCE. This, in turn, can help us understand the role of material objects in religious practices and the broader societal changes that occurred in ancient Italy. While the analysis of sanctuaries and their votive deposits will be discussed in Chapter 5, the next chapter provides a historical background to the study of Umbrian sacred spaces and their material manifestation.
Hawkes 1954, 155–168.
Droogan 2012, 79.
For an extensive review of the most common anthropological approaches to religion see Cunningham 1999, Morris 2006, Verhoeven 2002.
Bourdieu 1977; Bloch 1989; Bell 1992, 1997.
Bell 1997, 138–170.
Kelly and Kaplan 1990, Kertzer 1988, DeMarrais et al. 1996, Demarest and Conrad 1992, Fox 2012.
Levi-Strauss 1969, 1966; Leach 1976.
Koutrafouri and Sanders 2017, 111.
See also the work of other practice theorists such as Connerton 1989, Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, Comaroff 1985, Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994, Ortner 1989.
Donald 2001, Lawson and McCauley 1990.
Lawson and McCauley1990.
Fogelin 2008.
Hodder 1982.
The problem of finding a shared definition for ritual has led Bell (2007, 277–289) to state that there is never going to be agreement on such a definition because ritual has too many functions and meanings and, according to her, no scientific field moves forward because of a good definition.
Particularly illustrative of these attempts is Joyce Marcus’ paper on the necessity of making the study of ritual a scientific endeavor; see Kyriakidis 2007, 43–77. A list of the most recent archaeological publication on ancient ritual includes Fogelin 2007, Insoll 2001, 2004; Kyriakidis 2007, Plunket 2002, Whitley and Hays-Gilpin 2008, McAnany and Wells 2008, Pauketat 2013, Renfrew and Morley 2009, Brumfiel 2001, Gonlin and Lohse 2007, Hayden 2003, Leone 2005, Swenson 2015, Droogan 2012, Raja 2015, Pakkanen and Bocher 2015.
Kyriakidis 2007, 297.
Renfrew 1985.
Insoll 2004, 96–97.
For an overview on the topic, see Hicks 2010. A very recent trend in “object agency” stems from the “posthumanism” of Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. Posthumanist theory is still a very new theoretical direction within Classics. Broadly speaking, archaeologists who apply this theory to their research emphasize nonhuman entities and downplay the differences between human and nonhuman agency. For a recent discussion about posthumanism in archaeology, see Kipnis 2015 and Selsvold and Webb 2020. Braidotti (2013) offers a good introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman.
Gell 1998, Hodder 2012.
Knappett 2005, 170.
Hodder 2012, 19.
For a definition of posthuman approaches as applied to archaeological investigation see Harris and Cipolla 2017, 17.
Meskel 2004, Barrett, 1994 and 2000, Sillar 2009.
Gosden 2005: 196.
Heidelberg University’s collaborative research center SFB 619 “Ritual Dynamics” is the world’s largest research association exclusively investigating rituals as well as their change and dynamics and, at the same time, one of the largest humanities collaboration research centers in Germany. The scholars and scientists involved in the project come from the fields of ancient and medieval history, anthropology of South Asia, Assyriology, classical and modern Indology, East Asian art history, Egyptology, history of South Asia, Islamic studies, Jewish studies, medical psychology, musicology, religious studies, and theology. Their contributions are published in Brosius et al. 2013.
Chaniotis 2011.
Chaniotis, 2012, 85–103 and 119–137.
Mills and Walker 2008, Van Dyke and Alcock 2003.
Bradley 1998, DeMarrais et al. 1996, Fogelin 2006, Lucero 2003, Moore 1996.
DeMarrais, 1996, Robb 1998.
Moore 1996, Fogelin 2006.
Turner 1992, 75.
Cf. supra, 41.
Rappaport 1979, Sobel and Bettles 2000. On the structuralist perspective on ancient ritual see also Geertz 1973.
Fogelin 2007, 66.
Insoll 2011, 3.
Griffith 2013, 325.
Edlund-Berry 1987.
On vows and votive religion, see Rudhardt 1992, 187–202; Burkert 1985, 68–70.
Burkert 1987, 43–44.
Osborne 2004.
Nijboer 2001.
Schultz 2006.
Gleba and Becker 2008, de Grummond 2011.
Glinister 2006a and 2006b, Karyakidis 2007, Pakkanen and Bocher 2015.
Osborne 2004, 5–6.
For a summary, see Kyriakidis 2007, 20–23.
For this research, I will use these terms interchangeably. In addition, I have resolved that the basic evidence for the identification of a site as ritual is the secure presence of material culture that indicates participation in the Umbrian wide ritual complex. As will be made clear later in this section, this polythetic set consists mainly of small bronze figurines.
Renfrew 1985, Warren 1988.
Faro 2008.
Briault 2007.
Pakkanen and Bocher 2015.
Graham and Draycott 2017, 45–63.
Graham and Draycott 2017, 49.
Graham’s perspective is that religion is primarily practiced as a lived experience, highlighting how individuals’ experiences are formed through tangible, situational, and physical acts of rituals: Graham 2020.
Battiloro 2018.
Stek and Burgers 2015; esp. De Cazanove, pp. 29–67.
Liv. 5.1.; for Etruscan religion, see de Grummond and Simon 2006 and Turfa 2013 with extensive bibliography.
De Grummond and Edlund-Berry 2011. Etruscan ritual is also approached in the volume edited by Gleba and Becker (2009), where the authors consider mortuary customs, votive rituals and other religious and daily life practices. It is worth mentioning also the framework developed by Bonghi Jovino (2005) and Bagnasco (2005) for Pian di Civita, Tarquinia. They distinguish four main ritual categories (propitiation, foundation, celebration, obliteration) and their physical “containers” (natural or artificial, open or closed, etc.).
De Grummond and Edlund-Berry 2011, 68–89.
De Grummond and Edlund-Berry 2011, 127–139.
Colonna 1970.
For a full overview of pre-Roman (and Roman) types of votive offerings, see Appendix 1.
Colonna’s classifications are included in Appendix 1, where I describe the types of Umbrian figurative votives.
Roncalli 1989, 1990; Roncalli and Bonfante 1991.
Bruschetti 1989, 114 and 124. For a revisionist approach to this view, see Chapter 6.
Sisani 2007.
Bonomi Ponzi 1990, 64; Bonomi Ponzi 1991, 59.
Cenciaioli 1991, 212.
Monacchi 1984, 80–81; cf. Cenciaioli 1998.
Bradley, 2000, 68.
Glinister (1997, 73) rightly points out that among Italic people, elite involvement in sanctuaries becomes visible from the second century BCE, when members of the elite begin to leave inscriptions at rural sanctuaries.
Colonna’s close examination of the stylistic details of votive groups can hint at the type of monetary investment spent for the pre-Roman dedications. The presence of a significant number of simple figurines without much refinement may indicate a meager monetary investment in the purchase while the offer of an elaborated object, carefully modeled and of significant size, can be interpreted as a sign of a more substantial investment in the religious activity.
Bradley 1997, 118.
See Chapter 4 for a list of wealthy pre-Roman necropoleis in Umbria. For a discussion of how the expenditure on votive offerings in the region can inform us about larger social trends related to the function of Umbrian sanctuaries, see Chapter 6.
Stoddart and Malone 1994, 149–152. The Gubbio Project, led by Simon Stoddart and Caroline Malone from the University of Cambridge, has ended fieldwork and excavation at Monte Ansciano and Monte Ingino, in the ancient Umbrian town of Iuguvium. The project culminated in a publication in 1994 (Stoddart and Malone 1994).
Cf. n. 78.
Bonomi Ponzi 1994; Calvani et al. 2000, 331; Bonfante and Nagy 2015, 179.