Details
From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behaviour while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalise their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinise carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalised – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyse the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.
Table of Contents
- Ralph Haeussler and Gian Franco Chiai
- Interpreting sacred landscapes: a cross-cultural approach
Section 1 – Manipulation of sacred sites: monumentalising natural features
2) Francesca DiosonoInside the Volcano and into the trees. The sacred grove of Diana Nemorensis in archaic Latium between the literary and archaeological Sources3) Maria João Correia SantosSacred landscape and rock-cut sanctuaries of Iberian Peninsula: the principal of duality or harmony of complementary oppositions4) Leticia López-MondéjarThe transformation of cult places during the Roman expansion in the Iberian South-east (third–first century BC)5) Ruth Ayllón-MartínSacred spaces in nature: myth and reality in Celtiberia6) Csaba SzabóNature as sacred landscape in Roman Dacia7) Eris Williams ReedEnvironments and gods: creating the sacred landscape of Mount Kasios
Section 2 – Transformation of sacred landscapes
8) Lucia AlbertiOver the rainbow: places with and without memory in the funerary landscape of Knossos during the second millennium BC9) Christine Morris and Alan PeatfieldMaterial forms and ritual performance on Minoan peak sanctuaries10) Louise SteelTransforming landscapes: exploring the creation of a Sacred Landscape in north-east Cyprus at the Beginning of the Late Bronze Age11) Francisco Marco SimónMonumentalisation of watery cults in Tarraconensis and Lusitania12) Anthony C. KingRomano-Celtic temples in the landscape: Meonstoke, Hampshire, UK, a hexagonal shrine to Epona and a river deity on a villa estate13) Sarah McHughRenewal and Reconfiguration: Interpreting the Ilissos area of Athens in the second century AD14) Rita Sassu and Rosa Di MarcoThe impact of economics on sacred landscapes: Hoarding processes in Attic sanctuaries 625–475 BC15) Marco García Quintela and José Carlos Sánchez PardoLandscape, Christianisation and Social Power in late Antique and early medieval Galicia
Section 3 – Myth & Memory: landscapes invested with meaning
16) María Cruz CardetePan’s sacred landscapes in Classical Arkadia17) Gian Franco ChiaiCreating Sacred Landscapes in Roman Phrygia: the cases of Laodicea on the Lycus and Aizanoi18) Florian SchimpfOn urban rock sanctuaries of eastern Greece19) Julie BaleriauxWhere do rivers dive? Giving meaning to subterranean rivers in Ancient Greek thought20) Elena ChepelPerforming sacred landscapes: worship and praise of land in Greek drama21) Maxwell StockerIntegration and Interaction in Egyptian Non-Royal Sacred Landscapes: A Study of the Tomb-Chapel of Neferhotep (TT50)22) Marco PaloneDesacralised landscapes: Nilotic views in the Ethiopian Stories by Heliodorus23) Viviana SiaThe temple of Contrada Marafioti in Locri Epizephiri: a new approach
Section 4 – Experiencing Sacred Landscapes
24) Thomas JansenThe sacralisation of landscape as memory space in medieval China: ‘Ascending Mount Xian with several Gentlemen’25) Andy Valdez-Tullett‘God is on the journey too.’ Sacred experiences on the road in Late Bronze Age / Early Iron Age southern Britain
Section 5 – Landscape, Identity & Social Cohesion
26) Katharina ZinnCreating and conserving sacred landscapes: Abydos and Amarna – Keeping the spirit alive?27) Anna-Katharina RiegerSpatialising sacralised places: Landscape as analytical category for understanding social relations and spatial interaction of Graeco-Roman sanctuaries in the Hauran28) Matteo F. OlivieriSacred landscape manipulation in the sanctuary of Apollo of Delos: Peisistratus’ purification and the networks of culture and politics in the sixth-century BC Aegean29) Selga MedenieksCyrus the Great of Persia and the acculturation of religion at Sardis30) Anastasia AmrheinPresence in the landscape: encountering Neo-Assyrian kingship and divinity ‘from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea’31) Gilbert R. BurleighTemples, treasures, heroic burials and deities: A sacred landscape bounding Iron Age and Romano-British Baldock32) Ralph HaeusslerMemory, identities, transformations: the sacred landscapes of the Volcae Arecomici and the colonia Nemausus33) Daniele Salvoldi
(Re)Constructing the sacred landscape of Nubia in the early nineteenth century
Reviews & Quotes
"The 33 chapters give the volume an impressive chronological range, with case studies from the Bronze Age to the medieval period, as well as good geographical coverage. Editors Ralph Häussler and Gian Franco Chiai have curated an engaging volume that digs deep into the complexity of sacred landscapes."
Claire Nesbitt
Antiquity
(18/07/2022)
"This volume offers fascinating case studies on ways the interplay of natural and built environments underwrote the construction and contestation of past sacred landscapes."
Rachel Hendrick
CHOICE
