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Hagler, Alexia

University of British Columbia

This thesis seeks to explore how different modes of ritual dining in Roman Britain formed different ways of grouping-together. This work fills an important gap in the scholarship of religion in Roman Britain by moving away from the long-standing Romanization framework and towards a more nuanced understanding of the material evidence. This study also tests a recent framework posed by David Mattingly of a tripartite categorization of communities in Roman Britain as military, urban, or rural. The Carrawburgh mithraeum serves as the military case study, the site of Folly Lane in Verulamium as the urban case study, and the site of Higham Ferrers as the rural case study. The ceramic and faunal evidence from each of these sites is used to examine the chaîne opératoire of the practice of ritual dining within discrete stages of preparation, consumption, and disposal. The aim of this study is to prove that ritual dining as a practice is inseparable from and dependent upon the communities in which it is conducted. The top-down frameworks of Romanization or even Mattingly’s urban, rural, and military division are inadequate for examining situated practices like ritual dining. At the Carrawburgh mithraeum, worshippers used ritual dining to create hierarchical experiences and control access to certain rituals and information. At Folly Lane, worshippers used locally made, specialized vessels to commemorate a local hero/ancestor figure and his funerary rites that had been the catalyst for the resultant cult. At Higham Ferrers, worshippers made deliberate choices about meat and ceramic supply to the shrine to separate ritual meals from everyday dining. In each of these cases, worshippers made deliberate choices in how to conduct the practice of ritual dining that allowed them to construct, maintain, and negotiate their identity as a group, going beyond the limits imposed by previous frameworks.

Text

2024-03-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87639

Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/