Events > Wood
A seminar and discussion about material religion and wood. This online event will include talks by Michael Bamforth and Katie Rask.
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Talk titles and abstracts
Wood in Ancient Greek Sanctuaries: Self-Made Offerings at Brauron and Samos? - Katie Rask
Ancient Greek worshippers occasionally made their own offerings before presenting them to the gods. Through the process of making and through the efforts of their labor, these Greek devotees engaged physical artifacts over extended periods within the spaces of daily life, and also undertook a religious pursuit that was inherently creative and productive. Wood was an especially accessible material for this type of self-making endeavor. In many areas it was easy to come by, it is a material that can be altered using a simple knife, and mastering its carving can be done at a relatively young age. Epigraphic evidence and treasury records indicate that many wooden objects were presented in sanctuaries, but it is more difficult to find these objects preserved in the Greek archaeological record. Wooden artifacts have been preserved at some sites with especially wet, anerobic conditions; the sanctuary of Artemis (Brauron) and the Heraion on Samos are two well-known cases that I will address in this paper. In addition to surveying the sorts of items that archaeologists have recovered there, we will consider the difficulties inherent in identifying workshop-produced offerings in contrast to examples made by non-professionals. Ultimately, studying the creation of wooden offerings from the perspective of embodiment, touch, and phenomenology is particularly fruitful. The study of self-made religious artifacts underlines the personal experience of Greek religious material culture, given people’s embodied, tactile encounters with offerings.
Vignettes from the trenches: Examples of the symbolic use of wood in ancient Britain from the Neolithic to Romano British periods - Michael Bamforth
For much of our past, wood has been one of the most democratic and widely utilised materials, readily available and familiar to all. However, despite its widespread use, ancient wood survives only rarely in the archaeological record, when specific burial conditions allow. We are left with a handful of opportunities to explore what must have been the widespread use of wood in ritual contexts. The occasional glimpses we do see span from small individual acts of material creation and deposition to the use of wood in large, monumental structures, bridging the personal and the public realms of ritual. These rare insights into what may once have been a vast repository of material can start to build a picture of the changing symbolic uses of wood over time, and perhaps even the significance of the trees themselves. Spanning ancient traditions of Prehistoric 'tree-burial' to the use of wood to carve votive offerings in the Romano British period, this talk explores a series of themes and patterns that plot the shifting role of wood in the spiritual life of past peoples.