Picenum: A Landscape of Ritual and Myth

The Central Adriatic region of Picenum is a relatively unknown area of Roman and pre-Roman Italy, but it has a rich material culture comparable with that of the Etruscans and spanning the first millennium BCE (ca. 900-268 BCE). This book explores the sacred landscape of the region and interprets the evidence for Picene religion for the first time. The book explores the relationship between the material evidence (votive deposits of figurines and pottery, monumentalised inscriptions), the topographical landscape and the people who used them. It considers how the Picenes may have experienced their environment and given it meaning, with a particular emphasis on sacred sites which have a mountain peak, water feature or cave as their cult focus. The volume will be innovative in bringing together (predominantly Italian) scholarship on varied aspects of Iron Age and early Roman religion, interpreted via a phenomenological approach. This approach reconstructs the physiological responses people would have had to their sacred sites, in particular, how they were experienced through sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Through a series of case studies the volume examines the places people imbued with significance, how they represented their gods, and their reasons for investing in religious rituals.