Sacred Space and Community Identities: Sanctuaries in Broader Thessaly from the Archaic to the Early Roman Periods

Abstract

This study examines the roles of sacred spaces in Thessaly as agents in the formation, maintenance, and negotiation of group identities in Thessaly from the Archaic period until the beginning of the Roman Imperial Period in Greece. I demonstrate that the individuals who formed the communities of “Broader Thessaly” (i.e. the Thessalian plains and its perioikic ethne) articulated, through their public sanctuaries, a number of local identities, as well as overarching regional and international identities. I employ an interpretive framework incorporating socio-anthropological approaches to the archaeological study of identity and religion, as well as aspects of experiential archaeology in order to identify and map the different forms of group identity articulated through the material remains of cultic practices and sacred spaces. At first glance, the sanctuaries of Broader Thessaly seem to lack “monumentality,” since there were few large-scale sanctuary buildings, and temple forms that were common in the Greek world (e.g. large peripteral buildings) were scarce in this region in all time periods. This work demonstrates that, rather than producing aggrandizing architecture, the individuals and communities that created and used these sanctuaries used a different set of monumentalizing strategies; one that emphasized the monumentalization of what was perceived to be local during times of particular duress in the region.