The Material of Polytheism in Archaic Greece: Understanding Greek Religion Through Patterns of Dedicatory Practice and Thought, ca.750–480 BCE
This thesis is an investigation of gift-giving in religious contexts in archaic Greece, in which I determine patterns of dedicatory practice across Greece, and then use these patterns as a window onto the mindset of ancient worshippers in relation to their many gods. I use new materialist perspectives to address religious and theological questions concerning Greek polytheism, including how ancient worshippers constructed, cultivated and understood the plurality of the divine world through the material they deposited in sanctuaries. I simultaneously consider gift-giving in relation to the mental and emotional experiences of worshippers, exploring the relationships created between humans and things, and between humans and the divine, as well as the agency of worshippers in choosing and giving gifts based on different factors. I dispel modern preconceptions of polytheism as chaotic, and embrace the diversities and variations of Greek religion by positioning the archaeological evidence at the very heart of the investigation. The thesis is structured primarily according to geographical parameters. The developing focus of analysis—from local to regional to cross-regional, from the relationship between different gods within one place to the relationship between sanctuaries of the same god across Greece—allows us to consider the votive material from various perspectives and, as a result, in relation to different factors involved in understanding worshippers’ relationships with the gods in archaic Greece. In this way, this thesis does not seek to reconstruct Greek polytheism in the Archaic period, but to set out alternative approaches, tools and materials with which we can explore ancient religious experience and thought in response to the many gods and the many articulations of the divine.
Classical archaeology, Greek archaeology, Greek religion, Sanctuaries, Archaeology of religion, Dedications, Votives, Greek archaic period, Religious belief, Theologies of Greek religion, Materiality of religion
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations