Building Rituals and the Ecology of Sacred Architecture: A View from an Ancient Mediterranean Contact Zone

Following Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s call to see buildings not as static objects but as moving projects, ancient architecture has increasingly been approached as ecology: ever-changing entwined assemblages of structure, object, and person. Recognition of this entanglement goes some way in explaining the prevalence across ancient Mediterranean cultures of building rituals: rites accompanying the construction, alteration, and abandonment of buildings. More diverse than the “foundation deposits” of Egypt and the ancient Near East, sacred architecture came to materially embody patrons, builders, and the broader community by embedding symbolically resonant offerings within foundations, floors, walls, and even roofs. The maintenance and alteration of these assemblages of hidden objects through time demonstrates their ritual significance alongside more visibly impactful elements of sacred architecture.

A reason for dismissal by earlier scholarship, these rituals’ resistance to classification in terms of culture or ethnicity is indicative of the complexity of ancient identity. Nowhere is this clearer than in Western Sicily, a transcultural contact zone where Greek, Phoenician, and Italic communities used heirlooms, luxury imports, and transformed quotidian objects to consecrate and embody their sacred structures. This paper will consider the sacred structures of three sanctuaries from the region: the Greek Selinus’ main urban sanctuary, Phoenician Motya’s kothon sanctuary, and the Sicilian hilltop shrine of Colle Madore. A holistic approach to these sacred structures as ecologies made ritually effective through building rituals, reveals the negotiation between individual and community, home and homeland, colonizer and colonized.