Walking Between Gods and Mortals: reconsidering the movement of Roman religious processions скачать в хорошем качестве

Walking Between Gods and Mortals: reconsidering the movement of Roman religious processions

Movement was a central component of Roman religious processions. While scholars acknowledge the regularity of processional activity, studies have traditionally focused on major processions such as the Roman triumph rather than considering the wider occurrence of religious processions. The nuances of how a procession traversed a city’s streets and its urban impact are not easily revealed due to the paucity of information from ancient literary sources. As a transient event with their occurrence largely held in the memory of those who attended or heard about them, processions leave little standing trace within the archaeological record. This paper applies a network analysis and agent-based modelling approach to consider new ways of studying the movement patterns of religious processions at Ostia, Rome’s ancient port. Focus is transitioned from trying to reconstruct routes based off of a fragmented archaeological and historical record to questioning the ways in which a cityscape affected a procession’s direction. This approach considers processions as dynamic events that engaged with both the people and built environment of a cityscape. By re-examining approaches to studying processional movement, we can gain new insight into how religious movement shaped social and religious interactions within the ancient city. Katherine Crawford, University of Southampton