Ricomporre la scena cultuale: fonti documentarie plurime e contributo dell’archeologia per lo studio dei luoghi di culto romani
Abstract
Archaeology plays an important role in reconstructing rituals, alongside literary, epigraphic and iconographic evidence. Its increasing importance lies in the fact that archaeological evidence alone can reveal practices that are not documented or cannot be documented in any other way. This contribution focuses exclusively on periodic rituals, rather than on those that were performed only once (una tantum). From this perspective, it examines the interior of the temple, the altar and its surrounding area, which together constituted the actual sacrificial space and were far less immutable in their arrangement than might initially appear, and finally the offerings positioned within the place of worship and the trajectory that they followed. The systematic contextualisation of objects provides insight about devotional gestures and demonstrates the full potential of spatial analysis applied to the topography of cult places, considering their layout in a dynamic way as evidence of rituals in motion: prayers, sacrifices, processions and the presentation of offerings.
Presentato: 05 Maggio 2025 | Accettato: 15 Marzo 2025 | Pubblicato 24 Settembre 2025 | Lingua: it
Keywords Devotional gestures • Archaeological evidence • Roman cult places • Spatial analysis • Ritual practices
Copyright © 2025 Olivier de Cazanove. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-931-3/002