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Update: 12th-14th April 2018, Edinburgh
Günther Schörner, Thomas Schierl and I are organising a session entitled: Remembering and Social Memory in the Roman West at the 28th Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference/TRAC (link: see session 4D) (sorry, the call for papers for this session is now closed) |
Social Memory, Cultural Memory
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Forgetfulness & Remembering
What do people, individuals and commuities, remember? This question is particular important in Rome's western provinces, most of which were rather illiterate and did not write down their history, at least nothing has survived... Is it possible that memory was preserved in oral tradition, through rituals, songs or plays, and also through rituals, behavioural and moral code, dress code, etc., despite the flood of Graeco-Roman literate culture...?
Some further reading on oral traditions: cf. e.g.,
MORE TO COME... |
Remembering through Religion
In the religious sphere we can find lots of instances of continuity and persistence between pre-Roman and Roman times. Of course, there is change, innovation, transformation, sometimes even abrupt ruptures, but we also find cult places that show an enormous amount of persistence in ritual activities over generations, despite the Roman conquest. Tony King, for example, has shown that there were only very gradual developments, hardly noticeable to contemporaries, regarding animal sacrifices across sacred sites in Britain from the late pre-Roman Iron Age to the 3rd/4th century AD (King 2005).
In addition, we find hundreds of Celtic theonyms on Latin inscriptions of the 1st-3rd centuries AD. Not all of them can be expected to derive from pre-Roman times, but they reflect a primarily Celtic-speaking population in the Roman Empire that might represent their own myths, religious and cultural understandings within the context of the Roman world. Together with iconographic evidence, archaeology, epigraphy and evidence for myths and landscape archaeology, it seems that religion could help to represent and preserve cultural memory. Below: two links to my project on "Sacred Landscapes" and on "Romano-Celtic deities". |
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