Cave and Worship in Ancient Greece

New Approaches to Landscape and Ritual

Stella Katsarou, Alexander Nagel, Stella Katsarou, Alexander Nagel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367859169
• eBook ISBN: 9781000296136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Religious Architecture
• Index: History

Cave and Worship in Ancient Greece brings together a series of stimulating chapters contributing to the archaeology and our modern understanding of the character and importance of cave sanctuaries in the fi rst millennium BCE Mediterranean.

Written by emerging and established archaeologists and researchers, the book employs a fascinating and wide range of approaches and methodologies to investigate, and interpret material assemblages from cave shrines, many of which are introduced here for the fi rst time. An introductory section explores the emergence and growth of caves as centres of cult and religion. The chapters then probe some of the meanings attached to cave spaces and votive materials such as terracotta fi gurines, and ceramics, and those who created and used them. The authors use sensory and gender approaches, discuss the identity of the worshippers, and the contribution of statistical analysis to the role of votive materials. At the heart of the volume is the examination of cave materials excavated on the Cycladic islands and Crete, in Attika and Aitoloakarnania, on the Ionian islands and in southern Italy.

This is a welcome volume for students of prehistoric and classical archaeology, enthusiasts of the history of caves, religion, ancient history, and anthropology.

1Introduction

On reading caves and ancient Greek cult

Stella Katsarou and Alexander Nagel

This volume found its inspiration in contributions presented in a colloquium organised by the two editors at the 116th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Boston in January 2018. The aim of the colloquium was to introduce, reflect upon, and stimulate new research and map out previously untapped paths in identifying aspects of worship and cult in the ancient Greek cave landscape archaeology of the first millennium bce in the broadest sense. Despite the bitter cold winter storm, the Boston session turned out to be a great success. It brought over 120 attendants together, demonstrating a great interest in our topic and the promising speakers, thus encouraging us to present their ideas and contributions in an edited volume.

The contributions introduce manifold interpretations of activities related to cult and worship in caves during the first millennium bce. The authors cover a wide range of material and employ various methodological and anthropological approaches to cave shrines, particular religious places and central theme in this volume, helping us understand religious activities, networks and community experiences, and ritual in cave spaces from several sites in the Aegean, including the Cycladic islands and Crete, the Greek mainland, the Ionian islands, and in southern Italy. The contributions discuss material- and practice-oriented aspects of cave cults based on archaeological evidence. Moving away from past approaches that introduced selected ritual accessories with religious, literary, and mythological connotations, this volume sets the research agenda on less featured and prominent cave shrines that functioned in the Greek rural countryside and on their communal, social, economic, and sensorial sides. It turns out that local cave shrines and their ritual traditions reflect, and maybe also affect, the reproduction of social and political relations within the polis. The inquiries raise a lot of further questions. How can we make sense of material expressions of ritual and cult in a single cave context and across cave shrines that represent different scales of cult activity? How did the materials function in the hands and minds of the worshippers in a local, regional, and temporal context? And, can we trace the local circumstances of the ritual settings and relevant formalised practices, and how they developed and changed across time and space?

The contributions in this volume reveal a broad spectrum of aspects archaeologists can infer of cave cults in ancient Greece and Magna Graecia, that were altogether merging and co-dependent, including cultural and material diversity and technology, sustenance of ceremonies, consumption and feasting, sensory experience and landscape impact, liminality, performance and votive deposition practices, formalisation in human relations, social identities, and the adaptation of traditions inherited from prehistoric societies. The contributions aim to update current research on cave sanctuaries in theoretical and methodological terms and widen our understanding of the spatial and temporal perspectives of ancient cave cult. Overall, they aim to situate the ancient Greek cave shrine on the forefront as an independent and important source of archaeology, providing insights to the practical, behavioural, and social aspects of worship and their relation to the ancient Mediterranean environment.

While ambitious and more systematic scholarly research on Greek caves of the first millennium bce reaches back to the nineteenth century, in recent years, cave archaeology, as a modern discipline of cave exploration, has greatly benefitted from new data and stimulating publications.¹ There is the striking quantity of evidence. With more than 10,000 cave sites on the mainland and the islands, of which more than 2,000 preserve evidence of human use in various periods, and remarkable new discoveries every year, Greece offers a fertile and spectacular ground for discussion of the various aspects of cave utilisation and rituals through time. Most of the caves are of karst origin, which is due to the extensive limestone geological bed of the country. By their nature, caves can vary from rock shelters and shallow cavities, usually appearing on eroded cliffs and littoral zones, to very deep and complex horizontal and vertical subterranean chambers manifesting rich natural decoration by speleothems and active water resources around dripping stalagmites, lakes, or even rivers.²

Caves inspire us like an ethereal light piercing into a dark abyss (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Exploring caves has been a common practice since the beginning of humanity, and in many ways, all contributors to this volume follow our ancestors’ curiosity about hidden things in these spaces. Caves represent the subconscious and a poetic, romantic, and philosophical source.³ Modern cave archaeology has no beginning, unless we argue that it became part of the “scientific revolution,” which gained momentum during the nineteenth century. In folklore traditions, the cave was constructed as a place for monsters, fairies or brigands. Early on, caves attracted scholars and travellers to the Mediterranean with their physical beauty,⁴ animated with the imaginary archaic caveman or the ancient visitors whose names were occasionally found inscribed on the cave rocks. At the onset of a growing scientific approach in archaeology in the late nineteenth century, caves were pursued for their historical context, then placed within the frame of the Homerian narrative, as shown, for example, by German Heinrich Schliemann’s endeavours in the Cave of Nestor in Pylos in the Peloponnese,⁵ or Choirospilia on the island of Leukas.⁶ Meanwhile, caves emerged as ancient sanctuaries and became privileged places for research undertaken by great pioneers. On Crete, outstanding votive deposits including pottery, terracottas and bronzes were discovered at various caves (Idaean, Psychro, Kamares, Arkalochori) around that time,⁷ contributing to the establishment of the notion of the Cretan divine grotto. Josef Hazzidakis conducted rescue diggings in looted cave sanctuaries of the island and secured ritual objects from the hands of collectors and looters. In the early twentieth century, Greek caves gradually began to acquire significance owing to the material evidence of the range of activities undertaken by the prehistoric communities and ancient settlements nearby. The remarkable cave complex at Vari in Attica, also known as the Nympholept Cave, revealed rock inscriptions about the Nymph-possessed man who established it in the fifth century BCE, and exciting votive objects in the excavations that took place in 1901.⁸ Many of the finds are on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, reflecting the display of early discoveries of cave ritual deposits in the modern museum context. A visit to the cave of Vari is still popular among archaeology enthusiasts.

More ancient cave shrines were discovered in the following decades,⁹ including the Pitsa Cave in Corinthia with its extraordinarily well preserved painted plaques of wood depicting a procession to sacrifice.¹⁰ In the 1930s, Sylvia Benton sailed into the bays of the western Greek mainland and the Ionian islands to explore caves: “I went first…”, she writes about climbing up to the “yawning black cave-mouth in the precipice of limestone” at Astakos, Akarnania.¹¹ Spyridon Marinatos excavated further inside the labyrinthine cave shrine at Arkalochori on Crete around that time. Edith Eccles conducted fieldwork in the two caves of Aghio Galas on Chios, and Adalbert Markovits surveyed thousands of cavities on the coasts of Attica.¹² As more caves were excavated throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars of Greek religion became aware of possible meanings and their importance for life in the ancient polis and borderlands.¹³

Figure 1.1View of the Ionian Sea from Varasova Cave in Aitoloakarnania. Photograph: K. Bakolitsas.

Figure 1.2View of the entrance into Limnes Cave near Vonitsa in Aitoloakarnania. Photograph: K. Bakolitsas.

By the second half of the twentieth century, research on caves increased radically as diachronic history sites, whose thick stratified fills and occupation sequence could reveal cave-based activities, with an embedded value transcending past societies through time in an intensive and transgenerational course. After excavations in caves in the 1950s, including work conducted by Ioannis Papadimitriou in Attica and Carl Blegen again in the Cave of Nestor in Pylos,¹⁴ some key cave projects were launched in the 1960s and 1970s in Epirus and in the Franchthi Cave in the Argolid by international research groups,¹⁵ and in Alepotrypa Cave in the Mani by the local antiquities office.¹⁶ They introduced interdisciplinary paradigms and motivated a wave of extensive and systematic research and new inquiries. In this context, cave research in Greece enjoyed much excitement, which translated into a growing number of publications, and the consequent classification and taxonomic efforts generated by the wide range of material assemblages documented. A key moment for research on ancient cave shrines, specifically, was the excavation and subsequent publication of the famous Corycian Cave near Delphi initiated by the French School at Athens: over 16,000 vessels, 50,000 figurine fragments, and many other materials attest to the importance of this cave in understanding the sacred landscape of first millennium bce Phokis.¹⁷

This new wave of extensive and more systematic cave research and their fresh theoretical and methodological concerns (and also the imminent need to ensure cave heritage protection) have also generated certain institutional changes in the national scheme of heritage preservation in Greece, which involved the establishment of the Ephorate of Palaeoanthropology–Speleology in the 1970s, as a special office within the Ministry of Culture, to be responsible for cave protection, development, and interdisciplinary research supervision.¹⁸ This proved to be the start of a prolific period of cave archaeology in Greece which, in the 1980s and 1990s, saw a multiplication of the number of sites and cave assemblages documented. A series of state-sponsored cave field projects with a regional focus and a landscape perspective (e.g. Dodecanese, Euboea, Boeotia, Mani, western Greece) were interdisciplinary and addressed questions about patterns of prehistoric cave use and ancient cave rituals in new areas and the wider cave landscape.¹⁹ The field of prehistoric research immensely benefitted from more organised and systematic approaches to cave archaeology in the first place, by broadening the essential cultural and chronological perspectives to include technological, social, and behavioural concerns for the communities of hunter gatherers, early farmers, and pre-urban societies.²⁰

In the context of classical archaeology, new emblematic shrines in caves have provided an array of material data ranging from inscriptions on cave walls²¹ and boulders to affluent dedications of terracotta figurines, vases, lamps, metalwork, votive miniatures, jewellery, glass, astragaloi, alongside containers, and tools of mundane use. Within the wider theoretical frameworks introduced by prehistorians, classical archaeology has also benefited and updated its cultural and classificatory approaches to cave material appropriately, in order to explore other aspects of cave use such as religious behaviour, small- and large-scale interaction between c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: On reading caves and ancient Greek cult
• 2 The dawn of ancient Greek cave cult: Prehistoric cave sanctuaries
• 3 Caves as sites of sensory and cognitive enhancement: The Idaean Cave on Crete
• 4 Caves and consumption: The case of Polis Bay, Ithaca
• 5 Communities, consumption, and a cave: The profile of cult at Drakaina Cave on Kephallonia
• 6 A river ran through it: Circulating images of ritual and engaging communities in a cave in Aitoloakarnania
• 7 The Cave of Pan at Marathon, Attica: New evidence for the performance of cult in the historic era
• 8 The face of cave rituals: Terracotta figurines in Greek sacred caves
• 9 Cult and ritual in Cycladic caves
• 10 Grottoes and the construction of cult in southern Italy
• Index