How do we interpret the evidence of cult activity and building in Iron Age Italy, and how are we to understand the subsequent transformation of those humble forms of worship into the monumental temples seen in the Archaic period? This study by Charlotte Potts, a revised version of her 2011 doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford, tackles those questions by cautiously compiling and sifting through the available evidence of religious structures in Latium and Etruria over four centuries, and reviewing the vast secondary literature they have provoked. The result is a highly valuable reassessment and interpretation of the archaeological corpus which has wide-ranging implications for our understanding of early Italic history.
The study is executed in two parts: the first looks at the temple's form, while the second looks at its purpose. Part 1 (‘From Huts to Temples’) includes three chapters on so-called sacred huts, the architectural form of early shrines and temples, and their decoration. Part 2 (‘Religious Monumentality in Context’) consists of four chapters on forms of ritual activation (altars, cult statues and temples), ritual topographies (landscapes, cityscapes and temples), explanations of religious monumentality and a summary of conclusions. This is followed by a brief appendix on the Archaic temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Rome, which P. leaves out of her corpus, and a substantial catalogue of that corpus, which categorizes the evidence according to six building types: huts, shrines (including both small and long buildings), courtyard complexes, podium temples and altars. The book closes with a bibliography, brief index and eighty-four plates in black-and-white. The author's arguments are supported throughout the text by black-and-white photographs, line-drawings and tables, and the catalogue also features site maps and reconstructions. The majority of these are produced at a high resolution and legible scale.
The book has value and should have impact on many levels — methodological as well as interpretive. P.’s lucid definitions of her categories of analysis, her clinical scepticism of certain phenomena (for example, ‘sacred huts’) and the evidence scholars have marshalled to support them, and her efficient summaries of decades of fieldwork reports and scholarly debates guarantee that it will be a benchmark work, to be consulted by specialists for many years to come. (The clearly written and well structured text, which largely eschews jargon and glosses or contextualizes foreign terms, makes it fully accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate readers as well.) In addition, the author demonstrates an awareness of archaeological theory (especially concerning monumentality) and relevant debates in classical archaeology (particularly urbanization and cross-cultural exchange), which she balances cautiously against the available evidence.
While P. rightfully stresses the limits of our knowledge throughout her work, her well grounded conclusions suggest a significant shift in how we understand the development of, and impulses behind, monumental temple building in ancient Italy. This new understanding is rooted in her consideration of architecture not only as a structure, but also as a medium for promoting movement and interaction, whether between mortals and the divine or between larger social and cultural entities. First, P. argues that topographical and architectural aspects of religious architecture in central Italy during the period of the early eighth to late sixth centuries b.c. indicate the presence of dynamic change as much as, if not more than, the influence of inherited tradition. Second, she states that a new-found need to distinguish sacred architecture from the profane realm emerges in the Archaic period, in which cult buildings adopt a ‘dedicated religious aesthetic’ (for example, architectural terracottas) that marks them out discernibly from structures for human habitation. This would appear to indicate the development of the sacred ‘as a distinct conceptual category by the sixth century BC’ (118). Third, and most sweepingly, she holds that the development of a distinct architectural language for these buildings was internally conceived and outwardly oriented. That is, rather than maintaining the image of early Rome as a political and cultural backwater overshadowed by Etruscan pre-eminence, ‘this book supports reconstructions of Archaic Rome as an outward-looking city and a willing participant in Mediterranean-wide networks’ (120). In this sense, P.’s work should be read alongside that of other recent scholarship (for example, J. N. Hopkins, The Genesis of Roman Architecture (2016)) that seeks to map early Italic, especially Roman, monumental architecture within the broader compass of Mediterranean connectivity. As P. notes, only further work in this area will be able to confirm ‘the independence of Roman, and to some extent Latial, architecture from some Etruscan practices’ (121).
In summary: by giving equal weight to human actors and to the buildings they employed for worship, P.’s book effectively reframes the study of architectural typology and practice in a way that addresses central questions about early Italic belief and society. While the author has aimed her study at a very specific phenomenon and thus seems to be speaking at times to a relatively small audience of classical architectural historians, classical archaeologists and Etruscologists, her work deserves to attract the interest of a more extensive readership of Mediterranean archaeologists, anthropologists and historians. All readers will profit from exposure to her rigorous approach, meticulous analysis and thought-provoking interpretation of ancient Italy's monumental beginnings.
