From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behaviour while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalise their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practises. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinise carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalised – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyse the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1. Interpreting sacred landscapes: a cross-cultural approach
• Section 1 – Manipulation of sacred sites: monumentalising natural features
  • 2. Inside the volcano and into the trees. The sacred grove of Diana Nemorensis in archaic Latium between the literary and archaeological sources
  • 3. Sacred landscape and rock-cut sanctuaries of the Iberian Peninsula: the principle of duality or harmony of complementary oppositions
  • 4. The transformation of cult places during the Roman expansion in the Iberian south-east (third–first century BC)
  • 5. Natural sacred spaces in Celtiberia: myth and reality
  • 6. Nature as sacred landscape in Roman Dacia
  • 7. Environments and gods: creating the sacred landscape of Mount Kasios
• Section 2 – Transformation of sacred landscapes
  • 8. Over the rainbow: places with and without memory in the funerary landscape of Knossos during the second millennium BC
  • 9. Material forms and ritual performance on Minoan peak sanctuaries
  • 10. Transforming landscapes: exploring the creation of a sacred landscape in north-east Cyprus at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age
  • 11. Monumentalisation of watery cults in Tarraconensis and Lusitania
  • 12. Romano-Celtic temples in the landscape: Meonstoke, Hampshire, UK, a hexagonal shrine to Epona and a river deity on a villa estate
  • 13. Past and present: the Ilissos area of Athens in the second century AD
  • 14. The impact of economics on sacred landscapes: hoarding processes in Attic sanctuaries 625–475 BC
  • 15. Landscape, Christianisation and social power in Late Antique and early medieval Galicia
• Section 3 – Myth and memory: landscapes invested with meaning
  • 16. Pan’s sacred landscapes in classical Arkadia
  • 17. Creating sacred landscapes in Roman Phrygia: the cases of Laodicea on the Lycus and Aizanoi
  • 18. On urban rock sanctuaries of eastern Greece
  • 19. Landscapes of Poseidon Hippios in Arcadia
  • 20. Performing sacred landscapes: worship and praise of land in Greek drama
  • 21. Integration and interaction in Egyptian non-royal sacred landscapes: a study of the tomb-chapel of Neferhotep (TT50)
  • 22. Desacralised landscapes: Nilotic views in the Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus
  • 23. The temple of Contrada Marafioti in Locri Epizephiri: a new approach
• Section 4 – Experiencing sacred landscapes
  • 24. The sacralisation of landscape as memory space in medieval China: ‘Ascending Mount Xian with several Gentlemen’
  • 25. ‘God is on the journey too.’ Sacred experiences on the road in Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age southern Britain
• Section 5 – Landscape, identity and social cohesion
  • 26. Creating and conserving sacred landscapes: Abydos and Amarna – keeping the spirit alive?
  • 27. Spatialising sacralised places: landscape as analytical category for understanding social relations and spatial interaction of Graeco-Roman sanctuaries in the Hauran
  • 28. Sacred landscape manipulation in the sanctuary of Apollo of Delos: Peisistratus’ purification and the networks of culture and politics in the sixth-century BC Aegean
  • 29. Cyrus the Great of Persia and acculturation of religion at Sardis
  • 30. Presence in the landscape: encountering Neo-Assyrian kingship and divinity ‘from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea’
  • 31. Temples, treasures, heroic burials and deities: a sacred landscape bounding Iron Age and Romano-British Baldock
  • 32. Remembering and inventing: the dynamic rewriting of sacred landscapes in the colonia Nemausus
  • 33. (Re)Constructing the sacred landscape of Nubia in the early nineteenth century