Search

The massive amount of rock-cut monuments along the slopes of the acropolis hill of Philippi in ancient Macedon has received scholarly attention since the first expeditions and following excavation and research campaigns conducted by the French School at Athens in the nineteenth century. The documentation of these peculiar monuments, comprising images in relief, etchings, inscriptions, and empty niches, consists of very few early drawings, photographs of single objects and sometimes of clusters of neighboring monuments, maps documenting the monuments’ location along the slopes of the acropolis rock (intra and extra muros) and brief descriptions leading to an iconographical categorization. Despite a variety of subjects, the depiction of a youthful huntress commonly denominated as Artemis/Diana is predominating. Based on the commonly accepted dating of these reliefs to the Roman era, the rock-cut monuments are generally interpreted as expressions of popular religion that went unregulated by the state; some even consider them as evidence for specifically female ritual practice. As part of the project “Rock-cut reliefs in Philippi: a microregional study on the religion of ancient Macedon,” a first on-site documentation campaign was carried out in March 2023. The presented case study of the rock-cut reliefs from Philippi aims at spatializing the religiously connotated depictions within the city-/landscape as a first step and applying the concept of religioscape. With this approach, it differs in the methodology used so far, namely the iconographical analysis of the objects as a first analytical step. This article at hand presents the method used to establish the first three-dimensional data sets of the reliefs for documenting as well as monitoring their condition and aims to demonstrate the immense value of these 3D models given the dangers natural corrosion and vandalism pose to the archaeological objects. Moreover, embracing the ability to capture the landscape setting in 3D allows us to visualize the three-dimensional embedding of the objects into the urban fabric of the city with its varied terrain profile. This allows for new analytical prospects, such as inter-visibility, reachability, or building economy.

From a political point of view, 3rd century BCE Athens represents a shattered unity. Parts of the Athenian countryside and even the city itself were occupied by foreign troops. This loss of control affected the city’s political, economic, social, cultural, and religious life. Since Cleisthenic times, relations between political units and religious communities had become institutionalised through specific cults. Other cult places of relevance to the larger community and therefore with a catchment area that exceeded a deme, e.g. Eleusis, were also affected, as they lay within the occupied territories. This partial inaccessibility of the countryside risked the disruption of religious duties. The project “Cult and Crisis: The Sacred Landscape of Attica and its Correlation to Political Topography” aims to identify potentially affected cult places with no limitations regarding their possible catchment area by analysing their placement in relation to foreign military bases. Alterations in cult practice can plausibly be detected in changes ranging from cessation to the rerouting of ritual movement or the establishment of substitute cult places. As these “solutions” rarely feature in written sources, our GIS-based approach will focus on material remains from sanctuaries. Although an object’s use for ritual practice cannot be deduced with certainty, the distribution of finds certainly attests to human activity. This contribution presents a trial of this approach, taking the Sounion area as its case study.

In the fifth century BCE, Athenians intensified the worship of non-Athenian and non-Greek deities, a fact which has resulted in massive scholarly attention (Garland 1992; Parker 1996; Neumann 2022). While the legal facet of this procedure has been extensively analysed (Parker 1996; 2011), the spatial aspect of the establishment of new cults – the 'placemaking' – has been mainly neglected. This article re-examines the placement of the cults of Asklepios, Bendis and Deloptes, commonly assumed to have been a healing hero and a paredros of Bendis. Based on the iconographical analysis of Piraean votive reliefs for these divinities in combination with the spatial and temporal setting of these attestations, I argue that the Athenians provided space for this first wave of officially accepted religious newcomers close to the Zea harbour. At the temenos , which is usually identified as the Asklepieion and its immediate surroundings, several originally non-Athenian cults were installed during the Peloponnesian War, making it an anchoring point for the divine new arrivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]