Locality of Sacrality Theoretical Approaches to the Emplacement of Religion
Session I: Movement and Landscape
Saturday, May 1st:
9:00 am-12:30 pm
Session Organizers: Claudia Moser and Cecelia F. Weiss (Brown University)
Session Abstract: The discipline of archaeology has long been concerned with issues of ritual, religion, and sacred space. With an increasing disciplinary awareness of ritual theory and conceptions of 'place,' a deeper understanding of the connection between the two is likewise increasing. Ritual was often practiced in a specific topographic and material nexus, and as such a contextual study of the material and topographical aspects of ritual is critical. Ritual and religious practice, when viewed as bound in a network of times, places and materials, becomes 'emplaced.' Such a conception can reveal the interrelation between sacred and profane spaces, sacred landscapes, hierarchies of places and individuals, and ritual action as a place-making process.
This session will consider questions such as:
9:20: Claudia Moser and Cecelia F. Weiss (Brown University): Introductory Remarks
9:30: Carol A. Nickolai (Community College of Philadelphia): Ritual Space on Demand: The Ephemeral Nature of Religious/Ritual Space
9:50: Christina Williamson (University of Groningen): Power of Place: Labraunda, Mamurt Kale and the Transformation of Landscape in Asia Minor
10:10: Simone Paturel (Newcastle University): Locating the Sacred in Roman Syria: Roman Temples and the Constructed and Natural Landscape
10:30: Coffee break
11:00: Isaac Morrison (Montgomery College): The Dig at the End of the World: Archaeology and Apocalypse Tourism in the Valley of Armageddon
11:20: Paola Demattè (RISD & UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology): Itinerant Creeds: The Chinese Northern Frontier
11:40: Discussion
Abstracts and Participants
Ritual Space on Demand: The Ephemeral Nature of Religious/Ritual Space
Carol A. Nickolai
People routinely create and manipulate religious space, and the American landscape has been shaped by both public and privates spaces and their, sometimes surprising, flexible nature. The most public and permanent of these spaces are specific-use “church” buildings. Although generally conceived as unchanging monuments, they are altered by periodic redecoration and by sale. The next level is public space within public space. Some small churches rent space, some already religious spaces and some profane, resulting in layering as the small group transforms the space to fit their own public ritual needs. This emphasizes the ephemeral nature of the smaller group – it exists on the physical landscape only as a deliberate act. In similar layering, some groups have transformed space into religious space for their own purposes by converting stores and homes to “church” buildings. Finally, the most private and ephemeral are religious spaces in private homes, another kind of layered space. These are shaped by individuals for their individual ritual needs; a private, sacred space in the midst of the privately public profane space of their home. Highly ephemeral, they exist only as long as the owner chooses to maintain them and are often altered frequently. These last two kinds of space and place – space within space and private ritual space – will be examined closely for how ritual and religious space is created, re-created, and (temporarily or permanently) un-created. In addition, the implications of this for our understanding (and identifying) religious/ritual space will be considered.
Power of Place: Labraunda, Mamurt Kale and the Transformation of Landscape in Asia Minor
Christina Williamson (University of Groningen)
Sanctuaries that began as local shrines around some natural feature in the landscape often developed into major places of cult. As their rituals grew more and more embedded in common experience, such places could acquire a deep symbolic value for their communities. Representation, cult and landscape combined to place them at the middle of cognitive maps, despite difficulty of access or proximity to urban centers. This in turn often attracted political power, either from neighboring cities or rulers who borrowed the identity of these cults to strengthen their own.
Two such sanctuaries in Asia Minor are those of Zeus at Labraunda in the Late Classical period, and Meter at Mamurt Kale in the Hellenistic period. Chronology and region aside, these sanctuaries have several things in common: both occupy commanding positions in the landscape; both were located at frontiers, far from densely populated areas; and both were aggrandized by their respective rulers – Labraunda was monumentalized by Maussollos, satrap of Karia, and Mamurt Kale by Philetairos, founder of the Attalid dynasty at Pergamon. Both cult places thus acquired a regional significance that cannot be explained by theories based on polis cults alone. Cult, geography and power came together for a purpose at Labraunda and Mamurt Kale. They thus serve as case studies in which combined analyses of topography, social environment, material remains and visibility help to interpret not only the importance of landscape for such sanctuaries, but also the way in which they transformed the landscape around them.
Locating the Sacred in Roman Syria: Roman Temples and the Constructed and Natural Landscape
Simone Paturel (Newcastle University)
The temple of Jupiter-Heliopolitan at Baalbeck, Lebanon, is one of the largest temples in the Roman world. It is emphatically constructed on a monumental scale. The site is built on an ancient tell and raised some fourteen metres above the floor of the Bekaa valley to dominate its surroundings. The temple podium, although never completed, is partially constructed from a series of massive trilithons each weighing up to 800 tonnes. The statement made by the temple is one of massive construction emphasising human and Roman domination over the landscape. Many other religious sites in Roman Syria, however, strongly reflect the natural environment within which they were constructed. The ‘temple of the Muses’, adjacent to the temple of Jupiter-Heliopolitan, was allowed to flood regularly from the time of its construction in the late first century BC through to the early fifth century. The Roman temples at Qalaat Faqra in the area of Mount Lebanon are built in an area containing jagged limestone rock formations known as the “house of ghosts”. The Qalaat Faqra temples are constructed inside the boundaries of the natural rock, incorporating the rock formations within the fabric of the temple buildings. This paper explores the tension between natural and constructed elements of the religious landscapes of Roman Syria. In doing so the paper seeks to locate the sacred and ask whether it lies primarily in the constructed or natural environment?
The Dig at the End of the World: Archaeology and Apocalypse Tourism in the Valley of Armageddon
Isaac Morrison (Montgomery College)
Tel Megiddo, a major archaeological site in northern Israel, serves as a destination for thousands of Christian tourists every year. In a country graced with an abundance of Biblically affiliated archaeological sites, Megiddo is particularly distinctive because of its association with the apocalyptic conflict known as the Battle of Har Megiddo (Armageddon). This paper examines the sacred significance of Megiddo to its Christian tourist constituency by studying its position within the larger context of Biblical Archaeology and the religious tourism industry in Israel. This is facilitated by a unique heuristic methodology that uses word and data clouds to identify ideological rich points in tourism websites. Quantitative and qualitative review of site descriptions by fourteen different tour companies offering faith-based “Holy Land” travel packages reveals Megiddo's ideotechnic status to multiple distinct Christian demographic groups. Analysis of these denominationally-specific religious tour categories and their respective site descriptions shows how Tel Megiddo Archaeological Park is perceived as a fixed point in space on a linear continuum between two religiously significant temporal locations: the Biblical age of the Israelite kings, and the victorious return of Christ in the end times. This convergence of the past and the future through religious geography and tourist marketing creates a unique setting where Christian visitors are able to experientially reinforce their religious worldview by placing themselves within the topographic context of the spiritual and historical narrative at Tel Megiddo.
Itinerant Creeds: The Chinese Northern Frontier
Paola Demattè (RISD & UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology)
Organized religions are sometimes misperceived as static practices bound by fixed places of worship and defined rituals, and are thought to be inherently different from less structured belief systems that privilege individualism and mobility in the natural landscape.
In fact, landscape and movement have consistently played a major role in all belief systems. Thus, if the place of landscape in worship is prominent in cultures where mobility is a mode of life (hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, merchants, travelers), the sacrality of particular places and the necessity for believers to go on spiritual journeys to reach them remains a constant of many settled cultures.
A place where the implications of this “primitive-civilized” dichotomy are suitably shattered is China’s northwest frontier zone (Ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia). Here, prehistoric petroglyphs sites of Iron Age nomad pastoralists intermingle and interface with Buddhist caves of the Chinese “Medieval” period along the travel routes that have come to be known as the Silk Road. Mountains and springs, inscribed and worshipped by pastoralists or carved to be the abodes of Buddha and Bodhisattvas, are transformed into a large palimpsest that dominates over the single religion or ritual practice.
This suggests that more then the individual belief, it is the structure of the landscape, real or imagined, with its network of routes and visually or materially significant places that creates the sacrality. Yet, by this very definition, it also shows that the profane is never very far from the sacred.