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.

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.