Readers of The Votives Project might be interested to learn about the publication of a new book by one of the website’s co-founders. Reassembling Religion in Roman Italy (Routledge, 2021) by Emma-Jayne Graham focuses on ancient material religion, and among other things chapters feature discussions of sanctuaries and anatomical votives in ancient Italy, as well…
Tyler Jo Smith is Professor of Classical Art/Archaeology at the University of Virginia. Here she shares some of her ongoing research concerning rock-cut votive reliefs from the regions of northern Lycia and Pisidia, as well as her memories of the day she first encountered the ‘site with 40 horses’. One late summer afternoon in 1992,…
This week, two things reminded me of something that I have been meaning write about for The Votives Project for a while. The first was the excellent Remarkable Things conference at the University of Warwick (10th March 2018), where several papers drew attention to different types of (broadly conceived) apotropaic object. This included, for the ancient…
Laura Aho is a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki (Finland), where she is working on a dissertation on Greek and Roman votive inscriptions. In this post she shares some aspects of her research to-date, as well as discussing some of the challenges that she has been facing. The problem with deducing motives for…
Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future is a new edited volume just published by Routledge as part of a new series on ‘Medicine and the Body in Antiquity’. The volume, edited by Jane Draycott (University of Glasgow) and Emma-Jayne Graham (The Open University / The Votives Project), is based on a…
This week I interviewed Monsignor Pietro Caggiano of the Pontifical Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary in Pompeii – home to a significant collection of ex votos which has accumulated since the Sanctuary’s foundation at the end of the nineteenth century. Monsignor Caggiano has written about the theology of ex votos, and he is currently curating an exhibition of ancient…
Did ancient anatomical votives actually work?
Andreas M. Murgan works at the Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. As we know, it was a common phenomenon to sacrifice objects in ancient sanctuaries and deposit them as a gift to the gods. It is not surprising, therefore, that we often find traces of such dedications in the form of pits or…
A new Italian catalogue records the results of recent excavations at the ancient Faliscan sanctuary of Monte Li Santi-Le Rote at Narce, which is located 9km south of the ancient settlement of Falerii (modern Civita Castellana). The assemblage of votives from this sanctuary is completely unique, and the publication, entitled I Tempi del Rito [Times…
Peter Stewart is Director of the Classical Art Research Centre and Associate Professor in Classical Art and Archaeology in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. In the first posting on this blog, Jessica Hughes mentioned an intriguing case of ephemeral votives — the sort of offering that leaves no traces for archaeologists to…
The Votives Project 