Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Creation, Manipulation, Transformation

Ralph Haussler, Gian Franco Chiai, Ralph Haussler, Gian Franco Chiai

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781789253283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior 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 monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize 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 monumentalized – 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 analyze 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.

1

Interpreting sacred landscapes: a cross-cultural approach

Ralph Häussler and Gian Franco Chiai

Towards a ‘thick description’ of sacred landscapes

Studies of sacred landscapes have become very popular in the past 20 years. One is no longer just interested in describing facts, such as the precise measurements of man-made religious structures (e.g. temples, shrines, henges, altars and tumuli) and the details of material and artistic finds (ex-votos, statues, reliefs, faunal and floral remains, textual sources, etc.). These are important, but we have long gone beyond this. Apart from a site’s (hypothetical) symbolic meaning, there has been a growing interest in understanding the actions, experiences and emotions of worshippers, pilgrims and priests. One attempts to understand the complexity of a sacred site and its relationship with other sites and features, both man-made and natural. How did the natural environment influence human activities, perceptions and religious understandings, and in turn how did humans interpret, shape and transform their natural environment? One may argue that the sacred landscape is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: we see it with our eyes but interpret it with our mind. In other words, any given sacred place may be perceived differently depending on the observer’s cultural and religious experiences and subject to time and space. We also must not forget that the landscape – in the widest possible sense – is also shaping us and that we are shaping the landscape: to put it simply, both ‘nature’ and humans not only have agency, but they are also in a constant dialogue:

Landscapes are mutable, holistic in character, ever-changing, always in the process of being and becoming.

(Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017, 2)

How much more is this the case when it comes to sacred landscapes? Have we really made significant advances in our methodologies? Some studies merely provide a gazetteer of cult places scattered around the landscape, plotted on a map, perhaps discussing some aspects of intervisibility or reflecting on people’s choices of myth and deities. This is an important first step in identifying the evidence necessary for a subsequent deeper interpretation. We must be circumspect of a certain ‘pragmatic’ approach that advocates a functionalist interpretation of cult places that has become common in recent years, in which the relationship between cult place and natural environment is marginalised and even disputed, for example by interpreting hilltop sanctuaries as mere ‘landmarks’ or ‘geosymbols’ that were appropriated by elites to consolidate their power (e.g. Golosetti 2016; see discussion in Häussler 2019). This almost appears as a reaction to approaches inspired by anthropology, sociology and philosophy, like those advocated by Chris Tilley and Tim Ingold. For the latter, the above-mentioned ‘functionalist’ view is interpreted as a ‘building perspective’ in which nature is objectified and the influence of the environment on humans negated (Ingold 2000, 178–81).

For the study of sacred landscapes, Chris Tilley’s seminal work A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994) – based very much on Heidegger’s and Husserl’s concept of phenomenology – has been highly influential. It shows how archaeologists can interpret a monument in its landscape setting and aims to understand how it may have been perceived by the ‘builders’, thus hoping to provide an insight into the builders’ original intentions and motivations (see review by Barrett and Ko 2009). One of Tilley’s essential concepts may be described as human engagement or experience of both the material conditions and the landscape. One can hardly deny that this must be important in order to improve our understanding of ancient sacred landscapes. But, for Tilley, the archaeologist’s personal experience of the landscape – having jettisoned his/her own understandings in order to experience objectively a past ‘Being-in-the-world’ (to use Heidegger’s term Dasein) – became an important factor in archaeological interpretation. Unfortunately, the results of this endeavour, as in the case of Tilley’s Neolithic landscapes, cannot necessarily be recreated by other scholars as these are highly subjective experiences, as demonstrated by Barrett and Ko (2009, 280–1): we all experience the environment differently since each person is ‘historically conditioned’. In their view, it is difficult to ‘decode’ an ancient landscape unless one presupposes that the ‘builders’ had a ‘predetermined plan’ how temples, tombs, mounds, avenues and any other features were meant to relate to each other, spatially and visually, which may often seem unlikely. Were ancient architects, carpenters and stonemasons really imagining how the finished temple or monument might be perceived by subsequent worshippers, for example when climbing up to a mountain sanctuary during sunrise? Or were they more concerned with pragmatic choices, such as finding a plot of land large enough for the building complex, ideally with access to water and easy access for the transport of large quantities of building materials and the workforce to the construction site? Instead of looking for symbolic meaning, Barrett and Ko (2009, 287–9) emphasise the role of the social agents whose actions, such as building a tumulus, were challenging their own understandings and thus changing their awareness of materials and the environment. Let us conclude at this stage with a recent definition from Tilley and Cameron-Daum (2017, 7): the landscape provides ‘an existential ground for our embodied being: we are both in it and of it, we act in relation to it, it acts in us. […] the agency of landscape is embodied because it acts on us through the mediation of our bodies’.

This leads us to the social anthropologist Tim Ingold and his work on the temporality of the landscape (1993). It has inspired, in the words of Kolen (2011, 41) ‘an archaeology that is less interested in symbolic landscapes than it is in taskscapes […] and less interested in the mirror game of semiotic reflection and discourse analysis than it is in real-world encounters with the (material) past’ (cited by Hicks 2016, 6). The term taskscape can be understood as a constructed space of related human activities, recognising that ‘all tasks are interlocking, and that any one task is embedded in the way that other tasks are themselves seen and understood’ (Oxford Reference 2020). Among others, taskscape reminds us that we must not fall into the trap of grouping those activities, which we can identify archaeologically at any given sacred place, into artificial categories, such as ‘ritual’, ‘votive’, ‘funerary’, etc. More importantly for our study, Ingold also emphasises the agency of the natural environment – fauna, flora, topographical features – in shaping human behaviour. It is vital to investigate people’s interrelation with their environment and how this shaped their ‘processes of thinking, perceiving, remembering and learning’ (Ingold 2000, 171). But his approach also has shortcomings, such as certain flaws of his concepts of taskscape and temporality, as exposed by Dan Hicks (2016), or the failure to consider power structures and the ‘specificity of social relations’ (Bender 2001).

Whether adhering to the functionalist approach or following in the footsteps of Barret, Bender, Ingold or Tilley, each approach has advantages and drawbacks. This reveals that we are currently still scratching the surface when it comes to understanding ‘sacred landscapes’ and humans’ diverse relationships with their natural environment. As we shall see in this volume, each discipline has different approaches to sacred landscapes. Some studies, for example, adopt a phenomenological approach, but in each case it needs to be adapted to the particular archaeological, historical and cultural context that one is dealing with. It was therefore the aim of two international conferences that we organised in Lampeter in May 2014 and January 2016 to provide a venue to exchange ideas and discuss methodologies. Each case study in this volume improves our understanding of how ancient sacred landscapes can be identified and experienced and how people in Antiquity manipulated, transformed and engaged with their landscapes. By studying examples of sacred landscapes from across the ancient world in a comparative analysis, we endeavour to re-think and refine our methodologies and interpretations. A cross- cultural, multi-disciplinary approach allows us to compare phenomena and evidence from different ancient cultures. For instance, several papers discuss the diverse form of divinity associated with rivers, springs and lakes (e.g. chapters by Francesca Diosono, Francisco Marco Simón, Sarah McHugh, Marco Palone, Gian Franco Chiai, etc.). Others discuss sanctuaries on hilltops and mountains (see e.g. the chapters by Maria João Correia Santos, Florian Schimpf, Thomas Jansen, Eris Williams Reed, Ruth Ayllón-Martin, Ralph Häussler, etc.), and together they provide valuable insights into how people used, saw, experienced and interacted with their natural environment on a mountain, e.g. by carving texts or images into the surface of a rock. We can identify the diverse practices and motivations that people from different cultures were carrying out at a particular ‘category’ of sanctuary.

In this respect, modern religious experiences can provide additional food for thought. While our ancient evidence is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle (with 95% of the pieces missing), we can still ask people today about their religious understandings, their emotions, their interpretations and myths. Talking about rock sanctuaries, Busacca (2017), for example, has demonstrated that, in the case of the Inuit and Aborigines, the acts of carving or painting the images of animals or ancestral spirits on rocks are perceived as ‘deeply significant moments of relation’ with the depicted entity. This ‘entity’ is not simply represented in stone, it is embodied in the stone face. In addition to the act of carving or painting, we can imagine that engaging with these depictions may have involved ritual performances based on the ‘animation’ of images and the evocation of depicted animals or spirits. During such performances, which might also involve sound, scents or substances that may induce altered states of consciousness, the images were possibly regarded as alive and active. Ultimately, animal depictions carved in stone and their architectural arrangement both constituted the privileged space where the spiritual encounter between humans and animals could take place (Busacca 2017).

Such examples only reinforce the idea that sacred landscapes are, of course, human creations, and it is cultural constructs that give meaning to places and manifest, for example, the memory of human communities. Religious signs, performances, sacrifices, etiological myths, theonyms and epithets, as well as physical constructions (e.g. shrine, temple, altar, peribolos, etc.) together create a complex web of ciphers and symbols that make up the sacred landscape of a region, creating a ‘text’ or ‘narrative’; i.e. the sacred landscape has been invested with meaning that can be read like a ‘text’. Indeed, we should aim for a better comprehension – or dare we say ‘thick description’, in the words of Clifford Geertz (1973) – of the meaning behind the sacred landscape. We also need to explore how cult places and natural/topographic features may be read as mythical texts or narratives. This is particularly challenging in societies in which religious matters and local mythical accounts were not written down, or only recorded at a much later period. A comparative and multi-disciplinary approach, both among ancient societies and between ancient and modern case studies, can provide food for thought to challenge existing assumptions and re-interpret our archaeological findings. It is important to investigate how people might have experienced their landscape, for example in a phenomenological approach, how they interacted on a daily basis with natural features in the world they inhabited, and what rituals people carried out in the landscape.

But we must not forget nature’s ‘agency’. Many human actions and rituals are likely to have been inspired by people’s environment and by their experience of natural forces, their blessings and dangers, notably in the form of droughts, wildfires and earthquakes, as well as floods, inundations, tsunamis and landslides, to name but a few. Major disasters were not only attributed to divine action (or punishment), but they also entered mythical narratives. A common topos in many religions across several continents is, of course, the deluge (see e.g. Mulsow and Assmann 2006). Patrick Nunn (2014) has shown that many of these – often orally transmitted – ‘euhemeristic myths’ across the world do indeed present memories of extreme rises in sea level or the rapid subsidence of landmasses or islands. We can only imagine how ancient people would have coped with some of the current natural disasters in our modern world, such as climate change, extreme weather or the tremendous wildfires ravaging across the Australian continent during the hot summer of 2019–20 when this book was sent to the printer. Natural disasters can trigger the compilation of myths. And we must remember that myths exist to be performed, repeated and re-enacted through recitations, songs and dances. Not only do they help people to cope with disasters, but they aim to instruct people. And nothing is better for memorising myths and remembrance than associating these with physical or visual features, such as particular sites in the local topography that may acquire a ‘divine’ meaning.

Etiological myths and the landscape

It is almost as if the intimate features of locality formed a kind of prism through which the global facts of existence might be described.

(Wagner 2001, 73)

Wagner puts the relationship between nature/landscape and myth/religion – as already recognised by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Mythologiques (1964–71) – in a nutshell (cf. Hirsch 2006, 152). Across the world we can see over and over again that ‘religion’ and ‘myth’ resulted from humans’ curiosity about the world around them. People tried to explain natural phenomena in their environment, they tried to make sense of the seasons, understand birth and death, fertility and infertility, as well as ‘new’ developments, such as farming and fire, along with the domestication of animals and the changing relationships between humans/hunters and animals. Many of these aspects can be seen in early cult places, probably as early as 10,000 BCE at sites such as Göbekli Tepe with its anthropomorphic pillars, animal depictions and a violent iconography that for some may reflect possible coping mechanisms for life in a harsh environment (see Busacca 2017, 320).

This leads to etiological myths about the creation of the world and the origin of humans, together with the (often special or privileged) role humans play in this natural environment. In each case, it is imperative to consider the local context, since people’s interaction with their environment creates understandings – and myths – that reflect particularly localised choices and conceptions. For each case, we need to ask what environmental and topographical factors dominate the local society and theref...

Table of contents

• 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
• Section 2 – Transformation of sacred landscapes
• Section 3 – Myth and memory: landscapes invested with meaning
• Section 4 – Experiencing sacred landscapes
• Section 5 – Landscape, identity and social cohesion