The study of Rome and its contact with other cultures within its expansionist footprint is indisputably in its post-colonial stage. The decline of modern colonial empires in the latter half of the twentieth century led to a paradigm shift in culture contact studies. In its wake the traditional concept of Romanisation, in which Roman culture spread from the top down to inferior local groups, was widely critiqued for its colonial perspective and ultimately jettisoned. A variety of alternative approaches have been proposed (e.g. creolisation, code-switching, hybridity, cultural entanglement) and deployed by studies of the last three decades, in order to emphasise multi-directional exchange over unilinear diffusion and agency and negotiation over passive reception. Continuity and Change in Ancient Umbrian Cult Places is an example of this type of work. This book confronts two particularly Romanocentric assumptions about Roman-era Umbria: (1) that Roman presence in the region led to a decline in rural Umbrian sanctuaries and (2) that Romans imposed significant changes on Umbrian religious customs, evidenced by Roman-era deposits of terracotta anatomical votives. Drawing on some of the above theoretical developments as well as recent advances in Umbrian archaeology, Z.P. re-evaluates the material transformations in the Umbrian religious landscape as the products of a complex interplay between various Umbrian communities – their customs and priorities – and the ‘Roman imperialistic machinery’ (p. 6). Z.P.’s work offers a reconsideration of the Umbrian archaeological record before and after the Roman conquest.
The book opens with a seven-page introduction, which lays out Z.P.’s methodology and terminology as well as a roadmap of the book. The next two chapters provide robust overviews of scholarly trajectories, situating Z.P.’s work within the fields of culture contact studies and the archaeology of religion, respectively. The primary concern of Chapter 2 is the ‘Romano-centric image of Roman expansion in central Italy’ (p. 29). While scholars have successfully re-thought the dynamics of exchange between Rome and local communities in Etruria, Latium and Samnium, they (with the exception of G. Bradley, Ancient Umbria: State, Culture, and Identity in Central Italy from the Iron Age to the Augustan Era [2000]) continue to overestimate Rome’s influence on Umbria, partly because of a dearth of archaeological information. As such, the decline of certain Umbrian sanctuaries is attributed to their distance from Romanised city centres and the continuation of others, especially those with Etrusco-Italic architectural additions, to Roman munificence. Chapter 3 addresses the uneven treatment of votive deposits in the pre-Roman and the Roman periods: pre-Roman bronze figurines are interpreted as markers of socio-political identity, while Roman-era anatomical terracottas are given religious significance and treated as signs of changing ritual customs. Given the archaeological advances in Umbria in the last two decades as well as theoretical work on votives as objects conveying religious meaning, Z.P. notes that the time is ripe for reassessing Umbrian religious identity in the pre-Roman and the Roman periods.
Chapter 4 continues to contextualise. Where scholarship previously assumed that Umbrians were a cohesive ethnic group with a distinctive culture, Z.P. instead relies on recent studies that view ethnicity in ancient Italy as mutable and emphasise the importance of local community for determining one’s social and political priorities. From an examination of the epigraphical record Z.P. surmises the continued existence of an Umbrian elite class into the Roman period, which suggests that material changes were caused not just by external (Roman) factors but also by internal ones, i.e. local factionalism and personal agendas.
Chapters 5 and 6 present Z.P.’s argument and supporting data. In Chapter 5 Z.P. organises and analyses the archaeological data from fifteen different Umbrian sanctuaries across four geographical regions. For each sanctuary Z.P. first notes the topographical location and connection to nearby settlements, then presents the architectural and spatial distribution of the sanctuary and examines the associated votive deposits in the pre-Roman (sixth–fourth centuries) as well as the Roman (fourth–first centuries) periods. The data presented in this chapter challenge previous Romanocentric perceptions of Umbria by demonstrating that rural Umbrian sanctuaries continued to thrive during the Roman period and that anatomical votives in bronze and terracotta in some cases predated Roman presence. Chapter 6, ‘Conclusions’, is where Z.P. interprets the archaeological data through the lens of local community identity and agency. Analysing all the data across the sanctuaries and time periods together, Z.P. concludes that the increased appearance of anatomical terracotta votives is best understood as a Roman-era technological optimisation of a longstanding Umbrian ritual of well-being. Likewise, the decline of certain sanctuaries is a product of regional economic trends, while the monumentalisation of others can be attributed to the personal agendas of Umbrian elites, for whom public munificence brought opportunities to expand clientele networks and advance political careers.
The data-driven research underpinning Z.P.’s work is impressive. Z.P. notes in the introduction that her work assembles votive objects – published, unpublished and lost items mentioned only in archival reports – that have never before been compiled and analysed together. The three appendices are a testament to Z.P.’s notable efforts. Appendix 1 describes the various types of votive offerings and offers a bibliography, where applicable. Appendix 2, an Excel database accessible through Brill’s website, is a remarkable catalogue of over 1,200 Umbrian votive objects, the majority of which are unpublished. The database lists and describes each object, its findspot, location, date, measurements, bibliography and comparanda of ‘stylistically analogous types’ (p. 207). Appendix 3 is a photographic catalogue of the various votive objects mentioned in Chapter 5. The images are in colour, of good quality and plentiful. Chapter 5 also includes helpful site plans and graphs showing the distribution of votive figurines in each sanctuary across the two time periods. In addition there are four highly informative charts that synthesise the votive data from all fifteen sanctuaries in Chapter 6. These elements make the book valuable for researchers interested in Umbria, archaeology and material religion. Additionally, the thorough overviews of scholarship in Chapters 2 and 3 are helpful resources for those wishing to (re-)familiarise themselves with trends in the field.
A fundamental detriment is that the book retains the voice and organisational structure of a dissertation, meaning that Z.P.’s argument is deferred (i.e. absent from the first four of six chapters) and at times difficult to distinguish from Bradley’s, given her reliance on his work. When Z.P. advances her interpretations of the archaeological data in Chapter 6, they are often underdeveloped. For example, it is unclear how Z.P.’s ‘ritual of well-being’ is substantively different in function from rituals and votive dedication more broadly. Likewise, readers are left wondering precisely what R. White’s Middle Ground theory illuminates about Umbria and whether its use is justified in this context. White’s Middle Ground, originally proposed to explain seventeenth-century contact between French colonists and indigenous groups in the Great Lakes region, depends on a particular set of circumstances, for example, power parity. Z.P.’s use of the theory requires further justification, especially considering that theories of hybridity (of which this is one) have been criticised for their inattention to power dynamics as well as their reification of cultures as ‘pure’ and monolithic. Indeed, one wonders whether theories of cultural and material entanglement (applied to Rome by M.J. Versluys, ‘Understanding Objects in Motion: An Archaeological Dialogue on Romanization’, Archaeological Dialogues 21 [2014], 1–20, C.E. Barrett, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens [2019], among others) would have better suited Z.P.’s point that Umbria was a part of a ‘complex network of dynamic relationships and associations that involved the broader Italic peninsula and the Mediterranean as a whole’ (p. 7). Condensing the summaries of scholarship into a single chapter and interweaving her analytical ‘hypotheses’ (p. 172) into the body of the book would have aided Z.P. in developing her argument and investigating its implications.
Criticism aside, Z.P. accomplishes her goal of challenging the Romanocentric perceptions of Umbria. The book is a valuable contribution to studies of Umbrian identity, agency and materiality, and it lays the groundwork for the author’s future forays into the subject, of which I hope there will be more.
