This adaptation of a 2006 dissertation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sciences Religieuses) appears at an opportune moment for the study of offerings. For a century or so, scholars have divided offerings into those made at animal sacrifices, those made at vegetal sacrifices, anathemata and the like, and those classified as dekatai, with the first of these four categories being the most important. Recent work on faunal remains has made acts of animal sacrifice harder to recognise, and recent criticism of the sacrificial theories of W. Burkert and the French duo of M. Detienne and the late J.-P. Vernant has questioned the pre-eminence given to this ritual. In these new circumstances, how important is sacrifice compared with other offerings, and how should offerings be classified? These questions are all the more urgent because the last broad treatment of offerings, so far as this reviewer knows, is the ‘General Sketch’ at the end of W.H.D. Rouse's Greek Votive Offerings: an Essay in Greek Religion (1902), which divided offerings according to purpose. P. does not respond to this opportunity in the sociological vein common in the study of Greek religion. Rather than ask how offerings function in social terms, she asks how offerings function as part of cults, a theme that evokes Rouse, but that she develops with an archaeological acumen missing from the older book.

Chapter 1, ‘Les noms de l'offrande’, begins with a review of eight leading terms (anathema, doron, dekate, akrothinion, agalma, aparche, euche and mnema). Little here is new, even if her remarks about the use of thusia for vegetal offerings help correct the neglect of these offerings in the work of Burkert, Vernant and Detienne. Also valuable is the criticism of the distinction between hiera and hosia, or sacred and profane, already found in G. Kirk (‘Some Methodological Pitfalls in the Study of Ancient Greek Sacrifice’, in O. Reverdin and B. Grange [edd.], Le sacrifice dans l'antiquité [1981], pp. 41–80, esp. 69). This distinction, which derives from Hubert and Mauss, is essential for Burkert and others who envision the sacralisation of animal offerings through ritualised killing. Chapter 2, ‘La relation établie au moyen de l'offrande’, criticises the recently popular notion that relations between gods and worshippers rest on reciprocity. Contrary to this notion, the relation between the two sides is asymmetrical. At the end of this chapter, P. raises issues of law and morality that prevailing views of sacrifice cannot accommodate. Other topics found in this chapter are shrine property and the disposition of metallic offerings.

After these two chapters, which form an extended intellectual introduction to the subject, P. turns to the function that offerings serve in cult. Her analysis is spatial, with a chapter apiece for offering tables, altars and deposits of offerings, in other words, places of presentation, destruction and preservation. Chapter 3, ‘Les objets dans leur contexte de trouvaille’, has two aims: first, it attempts to reconstruct rites from archaeological evidence, but on a case-by-case basis, and second, it attempts to establish, again case-by-case, a distinction between votive objects and objects offered for other purposes. Each of these attempts faces difficulties stated succinctly by P. Archaeological evidence for rites sometimes is ambiguous, as in the case of tables supposed to be altars. The distinction between votive objects and others is difficult to establish without literary evidence. Among the objects whose purpose is doubtful are some found in or near foundations of sacred buildings. In interpreting the wells in the shrine of Demeter on Acrocorinth, P. holds that the objects deposited in these wells served as preliminary offerings allowing worshippers to draw near to the altar.

Chapter 4, ‘Les offrandes et l'autel’, asks whether the emphasis on the destruction of offerings, especially animals, has overlooked items deposited on altars without being intentionally burned. Here P. presents not a series of terms or problems, as in her previous chapters, but four unsolved cases: agalmata put on the altar of the Despoina at Lycosura, the lack of fire marks at the horn altar of Apollo at Dreros, the burned objects in the wells beside the altars in the chthonian shrine at Agrigentum, and the pyres at Eleusis. In each case the norm of destruction by fire does not apply. At Lycosura, there is no evidence of burning, and the rite in which the agalmata were deposited remains unidentified. At Dreros, evidence of burning again is missing, and the horn altar should be described as a table for sacrificial remains. At Agrigentum, wells were depositories, but some objects found in them bear traces of a fire ritual. At Eleusis, the best-known of these cases, scholars have debated whether the pyres in fact were altars, and whether the sacrifices were Olympian or chthonian. P. envisions a ritual that annihilated offerings in order to transfer them to the gods. These rites were preliminary, like the deposit of offerings on Acrocorinth.

Chapter 5, ‘Dépôts d'offrandes et dépôts sacrificiels’, addresses the problem of distinguishing sacrificial deposits from remains left by a sacrifice or by a meal in a shrine. P.’s analysis implies (although P. does not say) that where deposits are concerned there is no such thing as sacrifice. There are only deposits of offerings and, on the other hand, remains without any sacrificial or offertory character. Most of the chapter deals with the issue of chthonian and Olympian ritual, with P. observing that chthonian refers to gods or spirits, not any kind of ritual, and that terms for chthonian rituals, such as bothros, are poorly defined, as is the term megaron, used of rites during the Thesmophoria.

Although P.’s subtitle refers to ‘gestes’ as well as ‘contextes’, gestures are seldom her concern. She wishes to show – and succeeds in showing – that the archaeology of offerings presents ambiguities and surprises that prevailing notions of sacrifices and offerings cannot accommodate. She does not present a schema for offerings, as opposed to a survey of settings. For this reason, Rouse remains unreplaced. Why can we not have a collective volume that would replace him, with P. as a contributor or a co-editor?