Rethinking the Roles of Ritual Objects and Structures in the Roman World

This session interrogates what ritual elements do—visually and materially—in the Roman world from the Republican period into Late Antiquity. Altars, votive figurines, libation vessels, candelabras, amulets, baptismal fonts, and other ritual objects and structures performed multiple simultaneous roles. Claudia Moser's work on altars in Republican Rome and Latium demonstrates how these structures preserved "material memories" and prescribed ritual actions, while Georgia Frank's research on portable objects in late antique Christian processions reveals how material contexts mediated embodied participation.

Ritual implements consistently operated in spaces between conventional taxonomies. Altars were not merely surfaces for sacrifice; votive objects did more than just fulfill promises to gods; and baptismal fonts created multisensory environments beyond facilitating ritual acts involving water. Yet scholarly approaches have often privileged normative functions, overlooking the rich plurality of roles these objects fulfilled simultaneously.

This session invites papers exploring the active, plural functions of ritual implements across the Roman world from the Republic through Late Antiquity. Examples of welcome topics include but are not limited to: votive offerings functioning beyond gifts to become participants in religious communication; portable ritual objects creating shifting meanings through context and use; incense burners serving as sensory mediators and spatial organizers; inscribed objects communicating their ritual purposes through materiality and placement; and architectural elements incorporated into ritual spaces to become didactic tools in ceremonial performance.

We seek papers investigating how ritual objects' materiality, visuality, and spatial relationships shaped religious experiences beyond their conventional functions in both polytheistic and Christian contexts throughout Rome and its territories.