Connecting the Dots: New Perspectives on Mobility and Gathering in Ancient Mediterranean Sanctuaries

The Archeological Institute of America presents a lecture by Troels Myrup Kristensen of Aarhus University.

This lecture presents results from a recently completed five-year research project on “Ancient Mediterranean Pilgrimage” that investigated journeys to sanctuaries in modern Greece, Italy, and Turkey, from the Archaic to Late Antique periods. It takes up the challenge of “connecting the dots” in the archaeology of ancient Greek and Roman sanctuaries that traditionally has focused on buildings and monuments as singular, isolated units. The lecture instead proposes to reconstruct some of the different spatial and visual strategies employed by sanctuaries to provide evocative experiences through rituals, gatherings, and landscape features. In particular, it focuses on issues of mobility to, from, and within sanctuaries; for example, by means of both carefully choreographed processions and more improvised, informal gatherings. Taking inspiration from scholarship on contemporary mobilities, it asks questions, such as: How did movement within a sanctuary shape the experience of a pilgrim? And how may new approaches to space help us to identity patterns of movement as well as places of gathering within sanctuaries?

Free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Reed College classics department and Dean of the Faculty office and the Archeological Institute of America.