From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior 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 monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices.
The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize 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 monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative human-made, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze 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.
Author(s): Ralph Haussler, Gian Franco Chiai
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 448
City: Oxford
Cover
Book title
Copyright
Table of contents
List of contributors
Preface
1 Interpreting sacred landscapes: a cross-cultural approach
Section 1 Manipulation of sacred sites: monumentalising natural features
2 Inside the volcano and into the trees. The sacred grove ofDiana Nemorensis in archaic Latium between the literaryand archaeological sources
3 Sacred landscape and rock-cut sanctuaries of theIberian Peninsula: the principle of duality or harmony ofcomplementary oppositions
4 The transformation of cult places during the Roman expansion inthe Iberian south-east (third–first century BC)
5 Natural sacred spaces in Celtiberia: myth and reality
6 Nature as sacred landscape in Roman Dacia
7 Environments and gods: creating the sacredlandscape of Mount Kasios
Section 2 Transformation of sacred landscapes
8 Over the rainbow: places with and without memory in the funerarylandscape of Knossos during the second millennium BC
9 Material forms and ritual performance onMinoan peak sanctuaries
10 Transforming landscapes: exploring the creation of asacred landscape in north-east Cyprus at the beginning ofthe Late Bronze Age
11 Monumentalisation of watery cults inTarraconensis and Lusitania
12 Romano-Celtic temples in the landscape:Meonstoke, Hampshire, UK, a hexagonal shrine to Eponaand a river deity on a villa estate
13 Past and present: the Ilissos area of Athens inthe second century AD
14 The impact of economics on sacred landscapes: hoardingprocesses taking place in Attic sanctuaries 625–475 BC
15 Landscape, Christianisation and social power in Late Antique andearly medieval Galicia
Section 3 Myth and memory: landscapes invested with meaning
16 Pan’s sacred landscapes in classical Arkadia
17 Creating sacred landscapes in Roman Phrygia: the cases ofLaodicea on the Lycus and Aizanoi
18 On urban rock sanctuaries of eastern Greece
19 Landscapes of Poseidon Hippios in Arcadia
20 Performing sacred landscapes: worship and praise ofland in Greek drama
21 Integration and interaction in Egyptian non-royal sacredlandscapes: a study of the tomb-chapel of Neferhotep (TT50)
22 Desacralised landscapes: Nilotic views inthe Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus
23 The temple of Contrada Marafioti in Locri Epizephirii:a new approach
Section 4 Experiencing sacred landscapes
24 The sacralisation of landscape as memory space in medievalChina: ‘Ascending Mount Xian with several Gentlemen’1
25 ‘God is on the journey too.’1 Sacred experiences on the road inLate Bronze Age/Early Iron Age southern Britain
Section 5 Landscape, identity and social cohesion
26 Creating and conserving sacred landscapes: Abydos andAmarna – keeping the spirit alive?
27 Spatialising sacralised places: landscape as analytical categoryfor understanding social relations and spatial interaction ofGraeco-Roman sanctuaries in the Hauran
28 Sacred landscape manipulation in the sanctuary of Apollo of Delos:Peisistratus’ purification and the networks of culture andpolitics in the sixth-century BC Aegean
29 Cyrus the Great of Persia and acculturation ofreligion at Sardis
30 Presence in the landscape: encountering Neo-Assyrian kingshipand divinity ‘from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea’
31 Temples, treasures, heroic burials and deities: a sacred landscapebounding Iron Age and Romano-British Baldock
32 Remembering and inventing: the dynamic rewriting of sacredlandscapes in the colonia Nemausus
33 (Re)Constructing the religious landscape of Nubia in the earlynineteenth century
Index
