Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice in Ancient Mediterranean Religion

Conversations about materiality have helped forge a common meeting ground for scholars seeking to integrate images, sites, texts and implements in their approach to religion in the ancient Mediterranean. The thirteen chapters in this volume explore the productivity of these approaches, with case studies from Israel, Athens, Rome, Sicily and North Africa. The results foreground the capacity of material approaches to cast light on the cultural creation of the sacred through the integration of rhetorical, material, and iconographic means. They open more nuanced pathways to the uses of text in the study of material evidence. They highlight the potential for material objects to bring political and ethnic boundaries into the sacred realm. And they emphasize the role of ongoing interpretation, debate, and multiple readings in the creation of the sacred, in both ancient contexts and scholarly discussion.

Sandra Blakely completed her PhD in Classics and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, and is currently an associate professor of Classics at Emory University, with research interests in religion, mobility, historiography, and the anthropology of the ancient world. She has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Arizona, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Hellenic Studies, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem.