Themes

Four themes emerge across these sections that bind the chapters to each other and suggest specific ways in which ancient Mediterranean cultures contribute to the conversations about materiality and religion.

The abundance of literary sources from the ancient Mediterranean cultures relevant for these papers have both propelled and held back the application of theoretical debates in the archaeologies of the region. The risks of preferring ancient authors over material finds, the elitism of the texts, and the complexities of both literary genres and material evidence are core characteristics of Mediterranean archaeologies. These chapters suggest that one outcome of a material focus is a productive dissolution of the gap between text and object, a dissolution in which the life-world of the object, the viewer, the user, and the interpreter emerge as primary foci of interpretation.

Materials that facilitate human interaction with the divine are often, in these chapters, simultaneously the point of interaction among distinct political or ethnic identities. Material objects may pass through many hands and, particularly if they are fine works of art, multiple contexts. Ritual spaces tend to draw visitors from more than one cultural context, and ritual objects themselves may combine cultural signatures as part of their articulation of authority. The capacity of a single image to convey multiple meanings is foundational to the longevity of the Dioskouroi; the shift from a Greek to a Roman context transformed the narrative semantics and the ritual force of the fountain of Glauke in Corinth; the capacity for some visitors to find Asklepios, others Elijah enabled a diverse and long-lived community of pilgrims at Hammat Gader. These boundary crossings are not simply the accidental eventualities in the life world of objects and images. An active appeal to the ethnographic other is a source of authority in the language of the curse tablets, and the potential for ritual action to close the divide between Pisa and Rome, and private citizens and the imperial house, shapes the rituals for Lucius.

This polysemnity lies at the heart of the fourth common point: the centrality of interpretation to ritual experience. These multiple readings of objects and spaces derive from an awareness of the cultural embeddedness of embodied, cognized, affectively, and aesthetically experienced ritual. This embeddedness argues against models of hybridity, in favor of a more dynamic model of the human experiences created through interaction around material goods. For Diluzio and Blevins, this is the shared cultural experience of watching processions and sharing sacrificial meals. For Koster it is Cicero’s scathing critique of Verres’s blindness to the ritual norms of the cultures he robbed as well as the Roman culture he sought to inhabit. That interpretive process is shared by both the ancient emic audiences, and the etic interpreters of the modern era. Bundrick

identifies the role of scholarly prejudice in shaping centuries of interpretation of images. Darby's approach to the Judean pillar figurines is a direct response to the nearly canonical assumption that these were the ritual implements of women; Urquhart's extratextuality provides a framework in which precisely this process of interpretation is common ground for the ancient and the scholarly world. This casts down the gauntlet for scholars to acknowledge not simply their own culturally embedded biases, but also the potential for material evidence—held in the hand, seen with the eye, and interpreted most naturally from multiple perspectives—to advance our investigations of religion in the ancient world.