Sacred spaces on Greek mountaintops have long held a strong fascination for classical scholars. In recent years, these have become a focal point for new methodological approaches (for example, increasingly complex GIS analyses) and for a renewed interested in religious experiences (for example, within the scholarly framework of ‘lived ancient religion’); yet one persistent issue is the comparatively small number of well-published excavations at mountaintop sanctuaries.
The reviewed volume makes an important contribution to addressing this problem by presenting selected results of a four-week multinational excavation project conducted in 1997 at the late archaic Doric temple and fourteenth-century church at the mountaintop site of Agios Elias above the Asea Valley (Arcadia). During this excavation, a Swedish team focussed on three trenches across the temple’s southern cella wall and krepis (its inner chamber and stepped platform; trenches A1–3), a Finnish team on the area to the east of the temple (trenches B1–3, including a sacred hearth) and a Norwegian team on the documentation of the temple’s architectural remains.
In the volume’s opening chapter, Jeannette Forsén offers a detailed description of the stratigraphy uncovered by the Swedish team (i.e. in trenches A1–3). In contrast, the following eleven chapters, each examining a particular category of find, draw on material from the entire site. Considering the excavation’s organization, this is a practical and necessary approach, even if readers may occasionally wish that they knew more about the stratigraphic context of material uncovered in trenches B1–3. This issue will likely resolve itself through subsequent publications, but until then, for a broader picture of the site, the reader might find it helpful to refer to J. Forsén, B. Forsén and E. Østby, ‘The Sanctuary of Agios Elias: Its Significance, and Its Relations to Surrounding Sanctuaries and Settlements’, in H.N. Nielsen and J. Roy (eds), Defining Ancient Arkadia. Symposium, April 1–4, 1998 (Copenhagen 1999), 169–91.
Chapters 2–10 focus on inorganic materials from Agios Elias. In chapter 2, Forsén presents the site’s Protogeometric to Hellenistic pottery, which comprises exclusively fine wares, includes imports from various regions on the Peloponnese and beyond, consists of shapes comparable to those recorded at other Arcadian sanctuaries (with an emphasis on feasting and votive offerings) and largely predates the construction of the Doric temple around ca. 500 BC (with two peaks of visible activity around 720–690 BC and 590–550 BC). Noteworthy individual finds of later periods include two fragments of a Panathenaic amphora and a classical body sherd with a graffito. Further ceramic finds are discussed in chapters 3–5, with Forsén presenting the site’s plastics vases and figurines, Leslie Hammond its miniature vessels and Camilla MacKay its medieval pottery.
In chapter 6, Philip Sapirstein examines the roof tiles from Agios Elias. This material includes fragments of at least one monumental roof, probably from a temple constructed around 590–570 BC. Reviewing possible comparanda, Sapirstein proposes a date around 590/580–560 BC for the antefixes from the first temple at Bassai, a redating with important implications beyond the site of Agios Elias.
In the following chapters, 7–10, Rune Frederiksen presents the site’s glass finds, Michael Alram the coins, Carol Lawton fragments of sculpture and Forsén various miscellaneous stone objects. One discovery worth highlighting is a fragment of a life-size bronze statue (ca. 470 BC).
In chapter 11, Emmanuelle Vila introduces the site’s faunal assemblage and discusses it within the context of animal sacrifices in archaic Arcadia. Vila notes marked differences between the animal bones recovered in the trenches B1–2 and B3, the former relating to communal meals and the latter to the sacrificial practice of the thusia (in which an animal was divided between the gods and their human worshippers). This study provides a fascinating insight into archaic ritual practices and poses important questions about the logistics of sacrifices at a mountaintop sanctuary. One very minor error that has crept into this chapter is the arrangement of figures 87 and 88, which does not correlate to the captions (pig and cattle are reversed).
In chapter 12, Anastasia Papathanasiou examines the site’s human remains from the fourteenth century AD. Although this assemblage is relatively small, its investigation represents an important case study of biocultural adaptation during the Middle Byzantine period.
Forsén concludes the volume with the short chapter 13, pulling together different strands from the preceding chapters into a diachronic narrative. Two features highlighted are the impressive scale of investment at Agios Elias and the site’s links within regional and supra-regional networks. For the study of sacred mountaintop spaces, the remains at Agios Elias thus not only represent a valuable addition to the corpus of available evidence, but also a powerful reminder that challenges in accessibility do not make a mountaintop sanctuary an ‘isolated’ site.
