This volume is an insightful interdisciplinary study of material aspects of ritual sacrifice during the Republican period, focusing on select religious sites in the city of Rome and in Latium. The volume is refreshingly direct – the prose is clear, the claims made are well argued, and the discipline-specific terminology is well defined – making it relevant to scholars of Roman religion who may be less familiar with sensory and cognitive theoretical approaches as well as to a broader interdisciplinary academic audience outside the field of Roman religion.
The volume features four chapters, flanked by an introduction and an epilogue. The chapters are organised thematically, examining the organisation of sacred sites (Chapter 1), the economic aspects of votive offerings and rituals (Chapter 2), the seasonality of sacrificial rituals (Chapter 3) and the memorability of rituals and material votives (Chapter 4). Throughout the chapters M. employs and analyses primarily archaeological evidence from five sacred sites, spanning the period from the sixth to the first centuries bce. The five case studies examined include Largo Argentina and S. Omobono (city of Rome), The Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars (Lavinium), Area A at Fosso dell'Incastro (Ardea) and the Sacred Area of the Republican Temples at Ostia. Each of these sites, despite their vicinity to one another, reveal the variability of ritual sacrifice. Multiple interdisciplinary theoretical approaches are applied to the evidence in each chapter; however, the theoretical undercurrent that unites the chapters is the focus on sensory and cognitive approaches. Overall, the volume is clearly organised: in each chapter M. first presents a survey of the archaeological evidence and then proceeds to a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis and discussion, drawing conclusions on the cultural, social, economic and religious aspects of the sacred sites examined while anchoring these analyses within wider scholarly debates in Roman religion and Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR).
As the title of the book suggests, altars and the communal ritual of sacrifice are the primary focus of the work. Throughout the volume M. envisages altars as both spatial and temporal foci of ritual sacrifice; uniting ritual participants in the lived experience despite changing religious space, worshippers, practices and beliefs. As permanently fixed features of the religious space, the altars preserve memory of past ritual practices and inform future ritual behaviours, thus connecting the past, the present and the future of a religious site, and ultimately becoming timeless agents of ritual. The communal ritual of sacrifice, inextricably intertwined with the materiality of the altar, is to be understood as likewise intemporal yet locally variable, created through the interplay of material and human agency. Resonating throughout the volume, these arguments align well with recent research in embodied, situated and distributed cognition, and more widely within Cognitive Science of Religion. For example, in Chapter 1 M. employs research on minimally counter-intuitive concepts (MCI) and cognitive optimum position to explain how memories of rituals were preserved and passed down through generations of worshippers at the same site, despite architectural changes. Similarly, in Chapter 4, M. critically engages with the cognitive and sensory scholarship of Pascal Boyer, Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson, Harvey Whitehouse and Yannis Hamilakis, in order to examine how altars can act as mnemonic devices, preserving and transmitting ritual practices over the centuries. However, given the focus on cognitive and sensory approaches, it would have been interesting to include also G. Schörner's research on sacrifice rituals (e.g. ‘Animal Sacrifices in Roman Asia Minor and its Depictions: a Cognitive Approach’, in: P. Meineck et al. [edd.], The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory [2019]; ‘Representing and Remembering Rituals in Public Space: Depictions of Sacrifice in Roman Asia Minor’, in: E. Mortensen and B. Poulson [edd.], Cityscapes and Monuments of Western Asia Minor: Memories and Identities [2017]) as well as the research of E.-J. Graham on lived sensory and ritual experiences (e.g. ‘Pilgrimage, Mobile Behaviours and the Creation of Religious Place in Early Roman Latium’, in: J. Kuuliala and J. Rantala [edd.], Travel, Pilgrimage and Social Interaction from Antiquity to the Middle Ages [2019]; ‘Mobility Impairment in the Sanctuaries of Early Roman Italy’, in: C. Laes [ed.], Disability in Antiquity [2016]). Overall, M.'s pairing of ancient evidence with cognitive and sensory theoretical approaches reveals the local particularities of religious practices in Republican Rome and Latium while offering novel ways of unpacking some of the complexities of Roman sacrificial ritual.
In Chapter 1 M. uses theories of landscape and place in order to examine the spatial organisation of sanctuaries at Ostia and Ardea over time, paying particular attention to the positioning of altars and of sanctuary boundaries that delimited and informed movement within the sacred space. M. argues that these sanctuaries preserve and carefully integrate older votives and monuments within newer building phases, therefore enshrining the memory of past ritual practices and experiences within the sacred space. Although this chapter provides a fascinating discussion of how the organisation of religious space can impact the experience of a ritual, a more in-depth theoretical discussion and differentiation of the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘place’ within a religious context would have been welcome.
In Chapter 2 M. uses evidence of miniature altar votives (arulae) from Largo Argentina to reveal the cultural and religious diversity of Republican Rome, contributing to dispelling the perception of homogeneity of sacrificial rituals. Connecting the miniature, replica altars to their monumental counterparts, M. successfully argues for site-specific characteristics of ritual that are preserved through repeated ritual practice.
In Chapter 3 M. examines the ways in which seasonality affected the performance and experience of sacrificial rituals. By analysing faunal and botanical evidence of ritual practice at the sanctuary of S. Omobono, M. makes a compelling argument that the sacrificial ritual at this sanctuary was performed annually, at the beginning of winter, and thus was aligned with the agricultural calendar. Although M. convincingly argues for localised characteristics of sacrifice at the religious sites examined in Chapters 2 and 3, a more extensive analysis would have been beneficial of how the sensory and cognitive engagement of ritual participants with each site may have varied, depending on the size and organisation of religious sites. In particular, it would have been interesting to explore further how different ritual participants (ritual officiants vs ritual observants, for example) may have experienced the communal ritual of sacrifice.
In the fourth and final chapter M. explores the ways in which memories of ritual practices can become materialised through altars and other votive offerings. Focusing on archaeological evidence from the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium, M. argues that altars serve ‘as external prompts and mnemonic controllers’ (p. 110), which, when combined with repetition and sensory intensity of rituals, preserve past memories of ritual practices for future generations.
M.'s volume makes an important contribution to bridging the gap between traditional approaches to Roman sacrificial rituals and current cognitive and sensory research on rituals, therefore paving new ways of understanding ritual sacrifice in the Republican period. M. impresses upon readers that ‘Republican Roman sacrifice was molded and channeled by the religious places, objects, and resources associated with the experiences of the ritual: the material community of the sacred place’ (p. 13). In this respect, each setting of ritual sacrifice produced a unique ritual experience, reinforcing the idea that ultimately there is no universal way to conceive of ritual sacrifice nor a single way to experience it.
