Sacred Landscapes, Connecting Routes

At the crossroads of community, territory, and the divine is the landscape of religion. This landscape is shaped by those who occupy it, or desire to occupy it, and their ideologies as much as their cosmologies. But equally important are those who pass through it, and the flow of ideas that travel through its connections. Sacred landscapes are cultural artefacts, rooted in natural phenomena, legends and myths from the deep past, shaped by ritual performance and perception. They evoke by definition a sense of timelessness and yet are constantly evolving, subject to the shifts of formal and informal agencies across the scales. The religious environment is here addressed in terms of landscape, geography, traffic and paths of connection and communication and their material manifestations. How was sacred movement etched into the landscape? What sorts of media were involved in creating a ‘sacred’ landscape? Which material culture helped connect communities across time and space? The contributions in this volume explore these questions in relation to specific case studies in the ancient world, spanning the Mediterranean from Asia Minor through Greece to the Italian peninsula, in a time frame ranging from the Early Iron Age to the High Imperial period. They open up new areas to consider when looking at the phenomenon of sacred landscapes and connectivities. Such questions reach out beyond antiquity – they reflect on our own views of urban and rural space, and the importance of religion for collective identities and territorial claims today.