Supplementi e monografie della rivista Archeologia classica; 14, n.s. 11, Roma, «L’Erma» di Bretschneider, 2017, 632 pp.: ill.
ISBN 978-88-913-0845-0
ISBN 978-88-913-0843-6 e-book
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On the topic of votive deposits, archaeological literature has traditionally shown greater interest in the content of the deposition rather than in the deposition itself, proposing descriptive and formal analysis of offerings and works of art, often extrapolated from contextual data. Although more recently a greater scientific sensitivity has begun to be observed towards the votive deposit, intended as an archaeological category endowed with a high cognitive potential for the reconstruction of ritual practices, so far there has been no study – analytical or synthetic – on the subject. Hence the intention to fill this vacuum, starting from a wide and rigorously selected documentary base. Through the mapping of the colonial areas of Greek culture in Sicily and Southern Italy, in a period between the end of the 8th and the 4th-3rd centuries BC, so as to be able to grasp the beginnings of the devotional practice and its recession/transformation, the book proposes the processing of typologies of deposits, i.e. models to classify and differentiate the votive complexes, in order to overcome the disorder, even terminological, often present in research on this topic. Included within the palimpsest of the Greek religion, the votive deposits emerge as complex systems in which objects, spaces, participants and gestures coexist in close relationship. Moreover, the data and the developed interpretative instruments represent a useful tool to read the phenomenon of votive depositions in its general and specific features, potentially exportable also in other chronological and cultural contexts.
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Valeria Parisi is a PhD in Archaeology and Research Fellow at Sapienza – University of Rome, where she collaborates in research and teaching for the Chair of Classical Archaeology. She coordinates the scientific and didactic works of the archaeological excavation at Satyrion (Taranto). Among her main research interests, the archaeology of cult and the Greek religion – with particular attention to the reconstruction of ritual practices through the documentation offered by material culture – the study of terracotta figurines, especially in their semantic and functional aspects, and the Greek colonization in Southern Italy, in particular in relation to the early stages of the founding of apoikiai.
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Further information: «L’Erma» di Bretschneider
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