Excavations in the city center of the ancient city of Doliche in southeast Türkiye have brought to light the remains of a monumental apsidal building. Although the structure is poorly preserved due to looting and spoliation, the results of three seasons of excavation allow for an initial analysis and preliminary reconstruction. This article presents the building for the first time and discusses its importance in improving our understanding of monumental urban architecture in the region. The building is interpreted as a temple, and the article explores its potential links with apsidal temples in southern Syria and the Roman imperial cult.

This paper examines three early Roman priesthoods, specifically, the Vestal virgins, the Salii, and the Flamines, through the lens of their visual and symbolic prerogatives, adopting a diachronic perspective based on literary sources, iconographic evidence, and archaeological data. The study highlights the deep historical roots of priestly paraphernalia in pre- and proto-historic funerary contexts, as well as a significant shift in gender dynamics. Prior to the 8th c. BCE, numerous male religious and martial figures are depicted with double shields and other distinctive attributes. From the 8th c. BCE to the Archaic period, both male and female religious figures appear, often equipped with knives, while double shields gradually disappear. This pattern suggests an expanding definition of religious and political prerogatives. By the 8th c. BCE, specialized male and female figures (identified by their knives) assume religious roles, whereas male warriors become kings (reges), holding political authority and often serving as Augurs as well.*

Contemporary accounts of Mithraism emphasize particular, shared modes of anthropogenic place-making: spaces laid out in distinctive, bench-lined arrangements, which may have been freighted with a surplus of cosmic symbolism that was actualized through the performance of ritual. Focusing on the site of Močići (Croatia), we argue that Mithraic place-making must instead be situated in a host of far more localized and material relationships that afford their own particular modes, experiences, and semiotics of worshipping the god. In the case of Močići, those relationships include local karstic geologies, particular lifeways and experiences of the landscape, and the ways that significances were woven around natural phenomena. The site encourages rethinking both contemporary conceptions of “Mithraism” and material- and place-based approaches to cult in antiquity.

The well of Junia Rufina has long been one of the main features of the archaeology of Roman Butrint. This paper aims at offering a chronological and cultural context for its dedication by inserting it into contemporary urban and historical developments. The monumentalization of the well in the 2nd c. CE illustrates how increased access to and architectural display of water was a main aspect of urban policy in the newly founded province of Epirus, in line with the rest of the Greek world. The role of Rufina, on the other hand, can be understood in the light of the cultural policies of the time, and as a manifestation of the power and prestige attached to female patronage in highly networked families throughout the Empire at the time of Hadrian.

Whether the later Roman Empire ran short of precious or base metals, either at the level of the state or in private life, is a question that can only be answered in a tentative fashion. Surveying the period from the mid-2nd to the mid-7th c., this article weighs the difficulties presented by the full range of material and textual evidence, while attempting to establish a balance between all regions of the Roman world. It concludes by suggesting that there probably were indeed crises of metal production at certain periods, caused by the depletion of usable ores and hypothetically by a shortage of fuel.

Widely found at archaeological sites across the Roman Empire, the appearance in the late 1st c. BCE onward of the red gloss ceramic referred to as terra sigillata signals important transformations in the socio-economic organization of production and consumption for provincial societies. Nonetheless, relatively few studies have explored diachronically the ways in which the appearance of terra sigillata may have impacted local lifeways compared with the uses of earlier ceramics. This article explores these issues in the context of Roman Mediterranean Gaul, focusing in particular on the region of eastern Languedoc, by comparing, in both discard and funerary contexts, the differential uses of black gloss ceramics from the 3rd to the 1st c. BCE with later terra sigillata vessels. The evidence discussed here suggests that the appearance of terra sigillata was important in reifying more individual-centered social relationships in dining and other aspects of daily life.

The presence of the vilica or female supervisor at a Roman villa is attested across five centuries in varied texts, and her duties are detailed in an entire book of Columella’s On Agriculture. This paper challenges assumptions by modern scholars that her managerial functions were confined to those of a housekeeper, focused on food supplies for the household and the supervision of domestic labor inside the house. Through closer examination of textual, iconographic, and archaeological evidence, we can see that the vilica’s principal role was to oversee not the domestic sphere, but rather a range of vital productive activities on the farm. In particular, she seems to have been responsible for wine and oil making and for important rituals linked to production. This has implications for our understanding of the roles of women within Roman farming and the Roman economy.

This article analyzes the intersections between work and worship in the ancient Mediterranean from an archaeological perspective and provides an introduction to this special section. The goal is to challenge and move beyond two conceptual frames that have been deeply persistent in scholarship on the ancient world: (1) the imposition of two distinct category-containers “religion” and “work,” which we contend have been constructed and held separate due to particular idealist, capitalist, and colonialist ways of conceptualizing the past; (2) notions of the “embeddedness” of ancient religion, which we argue rarely acknowledge the underlying Polanyian economic baggage. We propose taking an explicitly relational and praxeological approach, drawing on notions of “lived religion” that, unlike the prevalent model of “Lived Ancient Religion,” often consider the intersections of production and worship, and focusing on the ways practices, spaces, materials, persons, and divine powers articulate in particular constellations.

This essay examines the use of an ordinary household item – a chytra (stewpot) – to ritual effect. It focuses on Classical and Early Hellenistic deposits under the floors of a single room of the Classical Commercial Building, just north of the Athenian Agora. The plan of the building and workshop debris found in its floors identify it as a workplace, and the repeated appearance of the chytra and its orientation and relationship to the stratigraphy and other objects constitutes evidence of the ritual practices of those who worked there. Ancient texts and other chytra deposits, both in this building and elsewhere in the excavation, throw more light on these practices, constituting evidence for “religion-as-lived” in the Athenian workplace.

Pompeian commercial and industrial shrines are often cursorily lumped into the monolithic category of lararia, obfuscating their complexity. The shrines’ diverse combinations of deities, playful iconographies, and spatial placements suggest complex and dynamic strategies of appropriation and bricolage. Contextualized reassessment of assemblages and features reveals remnants of creative, “vernacular” ritual action. I argue that Pompeii’s pistrina proprietors prioritized familiar, locally invested deities alongside or even instead of the Lares to create a more personal, accessible space in their commercial ventures for reciprocal interaction with the divine – most notably, a variation of Vesta and her donkey. Spatial choices also indicate preferential construction of shrines in spaces that were particularly risky, with many closely associated with the mouth of the oven. But shrines were just one tool in a wider protective arsenal deployed around the volatile oven, which included amuletic and apotropaic interventions.

The House of the Sarno Lararium at Pompeii (I.14.7) is known for the enigmatic scene painted on the lararium in its rear courtyard. Following a common practice in classical archaeology of identifying an artistic scene based on a reference in an ancient text, it has been interpreted as documenting the arrival of onions. This article proposes a novel interpretation. I argue that the scene represents a group of fishermen bringing their catch back to port, weighing it, and preparing it for distribution. To support this interpretation, I show how the imagery on the lararium can be linked to fishing and the pictured deity, Sarnus. Employing theoretical concepts of “taskscapes” and “lived religion,” I argue that this scene of non-elite fishermen indicates how household worship was entangled with daily labor, as well as how daily labor took place against the backdrop of a ritual landscape.

This paper investigates the ritual labor performed by the enslaved and freed members of the familia Caesaris who supported the emperor in his role as priest. Drawing on Roman art and funerary inscriptions, it contrasts elite and non-elite perspectives regarding religious work. Visual depictions – such as reliefs of the Ara Pacis and imperial sacrifice scenes – frame attendants as anonymous extensions of the emperor’s ritual authority, performing physical and sensory tasks that enhanced his prestige but denied their individuality. In contrast, inscriptions from the familia Caesaris record victimarii, musicians, and custodians of sacred implements who chose to highlight these roles in funerary commemoration. Their job-titles signaled skill, training, and membership in social networks that extended beyond imperial service, including participation in collegia and communal tombs. Examining these sources together reveals how ritual work was simultaneously devalued by elites and deeply meaningful to its practitioners, shaping identities, communities, and the lived experience of Roman religion.