Performing the Sacra: Priestly roles and their organisation in Roman Britain: (53 Archaeopress Roman Archaeology)

‘Performing the Sacra: Priestly roles and their organisation in Roman Britain’ addresses a range of cultural responses to the Roman conquest of Britain with regard to priestly roles. The approach is based on current theoretical trends focussing on dynamics of adaptation, multiculturalism, and appropriation and discarding a sharp distinction between local and Roman cults. The perspective is shifted from a centre-periphery model towards a spectrum of cultural responses. The book investigates a wide range of published and unpublished evidence to examine three main themes: a model of priesthood organisation, the embodiment of priestly authorities in a provincial environment, and how the different depositional contexts of priestly regalia contribute to our understanding of these roles. Previous accounts of this type of evidence from Britain has often linked the objects to local cults, for being somehow specific to the province. This was based on a limited search for comparisons among the evidence from other areas of the Roman world, both in terms of the individual objects and of the overall priestly organisation. Here, a methodical investigation of objects identifiable as priestly regalia and ceremonial tools was integrated into an assessment of historical, epigraphic, and iconographic sources. Mapped via the creation of a Geographic Information System and highlighting regional distributions, this work contributes to our understanding of the fluid provincial culture behind the religious organisation of the ritual landscape of Britain.

Table of Contents:
Preface; Chapter 1: Introduction to the study, assessment of the sources, and research questions; Chapter 2: Terminology, methodological framework, and data sources; Chapter 3: Priestly regalia from Britain. The material evidence for priestly roles; Chapter 4: Contextual analysis and distribution of priestly regalia; Chapter 5: Iconographic representations of ritual performers from Britain; Chapter 6: Epigraphic evidence of priestly titles in Britain; Chapter 7: Religious performers and their activities in Roman Britain; Appendix 1: Primary Sources; Appendix 2: Database; Bibliography

About the Author :
ALESSANDRA ESPOSITO completed her PhD in Classics at King’s College London under the supervision of John Pearce in 2018, with a dissertation on priestly regalia from Roman Britain. She has been a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology at King’s College London since 2014. Alessandra completed a BA in Latin and Greek Philology (2005) and in Archaeology and History of Ancient Art (2007) at Unverisità degli Studi di Napoli. After receiving an MA in Roman Archaeology at the same institution (2009), she worked in commercial archaeology in the area of Pozzuoli while completing her diploma of Scuola di Specializzazione (2012). She has taken part in and overseen archaeological excavations at sites in Italy (Cumae, Puteoli, Elea/Velia, Terina) led by Unverisità di Napoli, and in Jerash, Jordan, conducted by Aarhus University and Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Alessandra’s main research interest lies in the change in religious personnel and ritual performances in provincial communities after the Roman conquest, with a particular focus on archaeology of religion.

Review :
Making sense of the usually fragmented and ambiguous material is no small task, and presenting such a comprehensive dataset is achievement enough. But the author goes further, highlighting remarkable continuity between the Iron Age and Roman period, and assessing the pattern of deposition as well as use. 'The large quantity of objects from Roman Britain associated with people performing priestly functions is apparent to anyone who has written about religion in the province. Esposito’s book, based on a London thesis, brings most of these together... and is consequently very much to be welcomed.'