Conclusion
If the archaeological correlates of ritual activity can be read as indications of cultural discourses at play among indigenous communities in ancient Sicily, then the material record of their religious development reveals a situation that was multilingual and dialogical.
It is argued here that the changes in indigenous Sicilian religion can be read as the material manifestations of competing sociopolitical and cultural discourses that emerged in the wake of colonization. On the one hand, there was a more established ritual discourse that had long been articulated around graves, one that privileged things like the designation of certain spaces within a community, often with natural associations, for interaction with the supernatural sphere, the consumption of alcohol and food in those spaces, and the less tangible association of the supernatural with “the past,” as symbolized by dead relatives. On the other hand was a counterdiscourse, one that was activated by exposure to new forms of cultural expression and widening socioeconomic opportunities and a rejection of, or at least challenge to, longer-term social structures in the indigenous world, and that drew on forms of ritual expression and religious organization encountered while interacting with Greeks and Phoenicians in order to articulate and differentiate itself. In the dynamic context of postcolonization Sicily, communities tended to embrace one discourse or another, but in many situations, both could be present and credible within a single site. Settlements that built both round and rectangular structures, and that designated different expressions of the same ritual—for example, bronze dedication versus more modest forms of dedication—to each of those different structures seem to substantiate this point. Through the strategic use of old and new semantic traditions, then indigenous Sicilians used religion to speak to a variety of concerns in a period of rapid social change.
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