Divination in context. Divination practices and sacred landscape in the Roman sanctuaries of ancient Latium. The case of Diana Nemorensis.

Lancini, Loredana;Furlani, Stefano
(2024) XXe congrès international d’archéologie classique (AIAC) — Location: Paris - Campus Condorcet (3.June.2024)

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  • Lancini, Loredanaorcid-logoUCLouvain
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  • Furlani, Stefano
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Abstract
The sacred landscape can be understood as a space where agents of worship, worshippers, architectural elements, environmental features and religious practices interact. The study of sacred landscape entails also the analysis of how these factors contribute to creating a unique space, essential to the religious life of a community, in which peculiar and distinctive practices and rituals develop. We can consider a sacred landscape a space where the lived religion is enacted, not just an architectural setting, but a place where people in Antiquity would perform the rituals that are the core of the religious experience. Religious experience is thus constantly renegotiated by the dynamics between sensory perceptions, the layout of religious structures and natural features in which they are framed. The Hellenistic terrace sanctuaries of ancient Latium present some peculiarities that make them ideal spaces to investigate these aspects. Indeed, their facilities are scattered over several terraces, exploiting and even readapt the characteristics of the landscape and creating thereby new spatial solutions, settings that must match specific cultic needs. Remarkably, historical, epigraphic and archaeological sources attest precisely for these sanctuaries to cleromantic practices, i.e. divination by throwing lots. In this regard, it is useful to investigate the landscape with an interdisciplinary approach, thus integrating the study of the geomorphology and geological features. The objective is to understand how the natural characteristics of the territory contributed to shaping unique cultic practices, which can take the form of divination, understood as a particular form of communication with the deity. For this purpose, this paper investigates the case study of the Sanctuary of Diana in Nemi, where the enactment of divination practices has been recently highlighted. From a geological point of view, the site is located in the colli Albani volcanic area, a northwest-trending chain of volcanoes that developed along the Tyrrhenian Sea margin of the Italian peninsula during the middle and late Pleistocene Age. The volcanic history ended with the most recent and largest activity about We will investigate whether geological and geomorphological conditions may have influenced the selection of this particular site and inspired the practices that took place. This study aims to shed new light on how a particular landscape can favour the choice of performing divination
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Lancini, L., & Furlani, S. (2024). Divination in context. Divination practices and sacred landscape in the Roman sanctuaries of ancient Latium. The case of Diana Nemorensis. XXe congrès international d’archéologie classique (AIAC), Paris - Campus Condorcet. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/239838