Megan J Daniels

The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: How ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciences—the integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the cultural—and the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.

https://www.lockwoodpress.com/product-page/data-science-human-science-and-ancient-gods-conversations-in-theory-and-metho

This edited volume contains a collection of papers that interrogate the past, present, and future of migration and mobility studies in archaeology. The chapters answer to the advances in genetics, isotope studies, and data manipulation over the past decade that have revolutionized our understanding of human movement, and offer integrated approaches to understanding migration and mobility, incorporating genomic studies, computational science, social theory, cognitive and evolutionary studies, environmental history, and network analysis.

The introduction to the volume Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods examines the history of relations between classics, the study of religions, and the social sciences from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It outlines the intersections and divergences of these fields over this time span to take stock of where we are today, at the digital and interdisciplinary frontiers of the twenty-first century. It then introduces the papers in this volume that contribute to this ongoing dialogue between data science, human science, and ancient religions.

This chapter explores the role of religion and ritual in the dramatic political and economic changes that characterized the Early Iron Age in the Mediterranean (ca. 1200–700 BCE) through the emergence of several extraurban sanctuaries in the eleventh century and their associated feasting activities. It adopts anthropological models of feasting that posit this ritual as a major means of political and socioeconomic organization in the absence of statelevel institutions and centralized authority, arguing that such models can reorient our understandings of how religious spaces functioned as hubs for political reorganization and economic activity during these early post- Bronze Age periods. Case studies on some of the earliest ritual deposits at Olympia and Kalapodi are examined alongside the regional socio-political landscapes surrounding these sanctuaries, followed by a discussion of some of the major political and economic activities—centralized leadership, agricultural production and storage, long-distance trade, and communal wealth accumulation—that emerge in association with feasting rituals.

The corpus of carved ivories from the sanctuary of Orthia at Sparta forms one of the most cosmopolitan assemblages from Archaic Laconia. One image within this corpus, however, has remained an anomaly: a mirror-image scene on two plaques showing three figures mourning a deceased male in the prothesis ritual. The puzzling nature of these plaques rests on the dearth of imagery elsewhere in Laconia from this period displaying the prothesis, unlike Attica. These images have been viewed as representing a mythical death or a commemoration of an actual death, tied to a period in Sparta's history when elite groups claimed power through ostentatious ritual, but their overall meaning within Orthia's sanctuary remains obscure. I argue, however, that these plaques are not anomalies within the ivory corpus, nor are they divorced from the broader ritual programme in Orthia's sanctuary – rather, the ivory corpus itself represents a unified composition that merged scenes showing ideal activities for Spartan citizens with heroic episodes from myth, geared towards the achievement of everlasting kléos. The semantics of these combined iconographies are clarified via comparison with cultic implements described in ancient literature alongside extant examples of multi-scene figural pottery from the seventh and sixth centuries. This paper thus highlights the mythological and ideological meanings of the prothesis plaques within the broader ivory corpus, and elucidates the role of complex figural iconographies in the elaboration of heroic ideals centred on Spartan citizens in this period.

This assignment draws students into a critical examination of space and monumentality in the ancient Greek world coupled with a reflection of our own use of neoclassical architecture and iconography to configure contemporary public spaces. This assignment uses both digital representations of space (Google Earth) and the lived experience of modern-day spaces (self-guided local walking tour) to interpret the symbolism and ideology encoded into curated social spaces. Assignment design incorporates collaborative work and peer-learning through the development of the Google Earth resource in Module 1, as well as active learning in the walking tour evaluation of local monumentality, place-making, and cultural legacy in Module 2.

To study how the Roman emperors engaged with the imagery and symbolism of Hercules in matters of war requires engaging with the palimpsest of meanings associated with this god and his corresponding cultural manifestations over the long term. Throughout the first millennium BCE, Hercules emerged amongst the varied cultural groups around the Mediterranean as a multifaceted deity representative of many themes pertinent to empire. As a mortal who obtained immortality and who wandered to the limits of the known world siring royal houses and conquering monstrous forces, he epitomized the ideals of imperium and virtus, and it is little wonder why dynasts from the Roman worlds adopted Herculean symbolism in their self-representations. Yet he was also an equivocal figure, who migrated between venerable warrior ancestor, maddened brute, and exotic effete, making him an important counterpoint for ancient authors on the more ambivalent aspects of empire and conquest.

The clearest way to summarize Hercules’ military appeal to Roman emperors is his long history of mythical and dynastic prominence around the Mediterranean world, a history which went back to the Iron Age, and likely earlier. Hercules was a model for Rome’s rulers because he was a symbol of social power with a long history, recognized across numerous cultural groups who were incorporated into the empire. His characteristic imagery, which included the lion-skin cap and club, was a widely-shared symbolic language that could be employed in various cultural contexts, while the mythical tropes surrounding this god provided fodder for more erudite musings on the workings of power. The Roman imperial engagement with Hercules thus involved a symbolic language that was much older than the empire itself, but timelessly suitable and malleable to the purposes of empire. While this language was associated with bellicose endeavours like hunting and warfare, Hercules’ persona encompassed much more than brute force, channelling martial prowess into the grander civilizing missions of imperial rule. This lofty messaging can be read through the interrelation of a number of media – literary, numismatic, epigraphic, and iconographic – that formed a dynamic and fluid “symbolic system” of communication across the empire, both official and unofficial (Noreña, 2011: 199-200). In the first part of this paper I will offer an overview of the warlike symbolism of Hercules from the Iron Age to the Republic, followed by case studies into the Roman imperial employment of Hercules as a war god.

The appearance of the nude standing female in Greek sanctuaries from ca. 800 to 550 BCE is often chalked up to a hallmark of the ‘Orientalising period’, during which the Greeks adopted and adapted Near Eastern literary and artistic motifs into their own cultural repertoire. I push the dialogue beyond mere cultural transmission between Greece and the Near East and into the realm of shared social and political ideologies between elites from the Greek world and various parts of western Asia, as expressed and challenged through religious practice. I utilise the interrelated concepts of strong ties and ‘communities of practice’ to consider both the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of these socio-political networks. Large, ‘international’ eastern Mediterranean sanctuaries where nude female imagery was found enabled interaction and sharing of ideas. I outline long-standing symbolisms and ideologies associated with nudity in literature over the Bronze and Iron Ages, and argue that the nude standing female signified intimacy between humans and the gods, and was a symbol expressing legitimacy and power. The same aspirations were expressed through such dedications in Greek sanctuaries, although meanings were undergoing significant change by the sixth century BCE, as new conceptions of relationships with deities emerged in this period.

Migration is, paradoxically, one of the great constants throughout human history: our story is one of continuous movement and exchange, despite our attempts to draw neat geographical and conceptual boundaries around particular groups and regions past and present. This emerging axiom has come about via several means: fast developing methodologies such as aDNA and isotope analyses have truly changed the very questions that we can ask about our data. Combined with new sociohistorical models of the ancient world, these integrated approaches push for a migration-centered view of human history, one that sees mobility and migration as fundamental, constant features of human development and adaptation over the long term. This model, while releasing us from past paradigms that used migration almost solely as an explanation for cultural change, presents new challenges to archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and geneticists, not least those that involve teasing out the entangled causes, processes, and consequences of human movement to build broader theoretical paradigms. This introductory paper will present the objectives of the volume against archaeology's fraught history with migration as an analytical concept as well as our modern entanglements with migration. It lays the groundwork for the subsequent papers in this volume by highlighting the opportunities and challenges of a migration-centered paradigm of human history, and the promises of integrative, interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and multiscalar research.

In this post for Peopling the Past's Migration month (April 2022), I examine the history of the study of migration in archaeology from the nineteenth century to present day in Europe and North America. I mine this recent past for key lessons to inform debates going forward in light of new scientific advances in ancient genomics and isotopes, labelled the Third Science Revolution, as well as evolving models of Mediterranean history. Some of the key problems I bring to the fore include the different ways in which migration was employed to explain culture change, and especially how these studies were entangled with broader political sentiments in the wake of European expansions. I end by considering how these very problems still characterize our current attempts to study migration in the archaeological record, and articulate how parallel theoretical and methodological developments in Mediterranean history and archaeology can inform these new (old) debates.

This chapter explores the interrelationships between the Greek Heracles and Phoenician Melqart in cult, myth, and iconography from the Iron Age to Roman period. It articulates these connections not as a simple one-to-one equation of Heracles and Melqart, but rather views the long-term syncretism of these god-heroes as representative of the shared ideologies and cultural mentalities that emerged from human interactions and endeavors around the Mediterranean world in the first millennium BC. As such, a major focus of this chapter is the equivocal statuses that Heracles and Melqart inhabit between mortality and immortality, a status of particular concern for Greek and Roman authors in their portrayal of Heracles, and reflected also in cultic practices surrounding these figures in terms of their death and apotheosis. This status held particular significance for Heracles’ and Melqart’s roles in human affairs as divinized royal ancestors and colonizers par excellence, roles arguably expressed through their bellicose and leonine iconography. Examining the intersections between Heracles and Melqart thus reveals a great deal about human enterprises in the Mediterranean from the Iron Age to the Roman period.

Journal of Greek Archaeology 3: 165-201

By the Classical period, the Greeks knew Aphrodite by two major epithets, Ourania (“Heavenly”) and Pandemos (“All the People”). Ancient authors generally recognized Ourania as the more ancient of the two, evolving out the Near East, while Pandemos came to be associated with the emergence and civic unity of the Athenian polis. Our earliest evidence for the worship of Aphrodite Pandemos, however, comes not from Athens but from Naukratis in the Nile Delta, an emporion settled by several Greek city-states amidst Egyptians, Cypriots, Phoenicians, and others from the late 7th century BC onwards. Earlier scholarly evaluations downplayed Aphrodite Pandemos’ civic functions at this site, based on Naukratis’ ambiguous political status and the late nature of most of our literary sources for this goddess. Here I revisit the question of Pandemos’ civic functions through two avenues: (a) the new evidence for Aphrodite’s multicultural worship at Naukratis revealed through recent work by the British Museum, and (b) Aphrodite’s longer-term evolution, as Ourania, from Near Eastern deities like Hathor, Ishtar, Astarte, and the Cypriot Great Goddess, deities connected to overt and widespread ideologies of divine kingship across the Near East and eastern Mediterranean from the Early Bronze Age onwards. By situating the ritual patterning of Aphrodite’s worship against both her long-term evolution and her new persona as Pandemos in the Archaic period, I argue that her civic functions emerged amidst the vast social and political transformations taking place in the Iron Age and Archaic Mediterranean world. Within these shifts, new types of mixed, self-governing communities like Naukratis required novel religious and political ideologies that, while drawing from Aphrodite’s older Near Eastern roots, emphasized shared access to the divine in a newly-established, multicultural emporion.

In Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Roman Appropriation, edited by M. Loar, C. MacDonald, and D. Padilla-Peralta, 377-417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this paper I consider the symbolic expressions of Roman imperium as an appropriation of pre-existing networks of shared beliefs in response to the demands of imperial expansion from late Republican to early Imperial times. I argue that we must understand appropriation as a process that not only concerns the incorporation of exotica but also involves the reinterpretation of specific elements of a shared Mediterranean culture into symbols of conquest. Such symbols functioned, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, as instruments of “social integration”, which made possible a consensus on the social world.  The representation of Hercules-Melqart in literary, artistic and numismatic sources from Hispania to Rome is a potent example of this pre-existing trans-Mediterranean lingua franca, under which Roman rule could manifest and legitimize itself. Indeed, from the Iron Age onward, Herakles and his counterpart Melqart, the tutelary deity of Tyre, epitomized the network of shared cultic and mythic traditions which followed the overseas settlement of Phoenicians and Greeks, and which had a significant impact on the early cultic infrastructure of Rome itself. These trans-cultural associations subsequently took on local characteristics amongst the Punic and native communities of the western Mediterranean, particularly in Hispania. As Roman leaders from Cornelius Scipio to Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian appropriated the symbolism of Hercules-Melqart to legitimize power in Hispania, they evoked simultaneously the Roman takeover of a Phoenician-Iberian region and their own traditional connections to this common network of beliefs. Thus, through connecting the numismatic symbolism of Hercules in Hispania to contemporary artistic and literary references in Rome during the late Republic and early Empire, I will contextualize the mechanics of Roman appropriation as having both spatial and temporal valence. In other words, by using the symbolism of Hercules-Melqart, Roman conquerors transliterated a shared Mediterranean past into an increasingly hegemonic and expansionist present.

This piece, written for the online publication Eidolon, explores the legacy of one of Classics' more notorious iconoclasts, Martin Bernal, within the contexts of the US Culture Wars. By comparing the campus climate of the late 1980s, when the first volume of Bernal's controversial Black Athena first came out, to the current climate following the Trump election, this piece argues that Classics as a field must remain cognizant of the ideological usage of the past given the intensification of "left versus right" mentalities on US campuses. Above all, it advocates using figures like Bernal and his critics to teach students about the dangers of provincialism and the need to think openly about ideological (and other) differences.

Two significant developments during the later Mediterranean Iron Age (roughly eighth to sixth centuries BCE) are the proliferation of long-distance trade networks and the growth of urban settlements around the Mediterranean. In the paper I argue two main points: 1) that overseas communities geared largely (but not solely) towards trade were vital in facilitating and intensifying commercial and social relations between culturally diverse societies and 2) that common religious identifications within these settlements formed fundamental institutional structures to mediate transactions between foreigners. I thus examine, first of all, some recent scholarship surrounding the concept of the emporion in the ancient world, particularly in terms of its social and urban functions. I then turn to a specific case study involving the cultic activity unearthed at an emporion on the Tiber River in Italy dating to the sixth century BCE, on the site of what would later be known as the Forum Boarium, or cattle market, of Rome. The religious identities as illustrated through the archaeology and literature surrounding gods such as Herakles, Mater Matuta, and Fortuna were crucial in reaching across cultural boundaries, and speak to the diverse groups of people engaging in social and economic transactions within this emporion. I end with a consideration of how both a theory of institutions and comparative evidence from later periods can help us divulge the explanatory power of these cults in terms of the larger processes of urbanization and economic growth in the ancient world.

Keywords: emporion, religion, sanctuaries, syncretism, cross-cultural interaction, institutions, long-distance trade, economy, Iron Age

The terms " spartan " and " laconic " sum up our modern conception of ancient Sparta: a city-state founded upon hardline militarism and eschewing all forms of art and luxury. Yet some of our earliest evidence for this city-state in the Iron Age (ca. 1100-700 BCE) suggests that Sparta was originally a cosmopolitan and wealthy state tied into flourishing Mediterranean exchange networks. In this talk, Redford Postdoctoral Fellow Megan Daniels will examine one aspect of this cosmopolitanism: the religious offerings at the sanctuary dedicated to the mysterious goddess Orthia. In particular, she presents her research on two ivory plaques showing, arguably, the widespread myth of the death of a youthful god, and connects the symbolism on these plaques to notions of kingly power operating between western Asia and the Mediterranean world in the Iron Age. This talk thus engages the mysterious origins of Sparta with some of the more notorious religious theories from the early twentieth century – namely James Frazer's conception of the dying and rising god – to argue for fascinating networks of elite religious power operating between East and West during the genesis of the Greek city-state.

Network approaches are used by archaeologists and historians as tools to model relational ties between individuals and groups in the past as key predictors of historical outcomes. The growing uptake of these approaches comes in an era recently dubbed the "Third Science Revolution" (Kristiansen 2014), where the advancement of Big Data and computational techniques have revolutionized the types and amounts of information at our fingertips and our means of analyzing and visualizing its patterns. This workshop and conference aim to build bridges between often divergent disciplinary skillsets: the quantitative and computational side of network analysis and the qualitative questions and explanations that undergird network theory alongside historical and archaeological work.

A course reader for the undergraduate/graduate seminar, A History of Power: States and Empires in the Mediterranean and Middle East

Power is organized and manifested in myriad ways in human history: sociologist Michael Mann, in a four-volume study beginning in 1986 entitled The Sources of Social Power, articulated four major sources of social power: ideological, economic, military, and political. These sources of power operated in intricate and overlapping networks concentrated and dispersed throughout any given society. As human groups scaled up in complexity, these power networks became increasingly organized, developing into the world’s first state-level societies by the late fourth millennium BCE in the Fertile Crescent. The first empires followed in the third and second millennia in this region, and even bigger empires arose in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds in the first millennia BCE and CE. Throughout this long history, cities and city-states – at times fiercely independent, at other times banded together into larger leagues and even empires themselves – played a major part in the configuration of these power networks.

How did cities, states, and empires in these regions organize and make use of these various forms of power, and how do we study these power networks? Is there a logic to human power, and by extension to states and empires, that we can uncover through analyzing long-term history?

In this course, we are studying some of the oldest states and empires in human history through their literary and material culture. Building off of a foundation in anthropological and sociological theories of power, state, and empire formation, students have the opportunity to practice working with a variety of primary sources and to experiment in applying theory to data to articulate the workings of power in human history.