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38 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Viticulture, opus doliare, and the patrimonium Caesaris at the Roman imperial estate at Vagnari (Puglia)

  • Maureen Carroll
  • Journal:
    Journal of Roman Archaeology / Volume 35 / Issue 1 / June 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 January 2022, pp. 221-246
    Print publication:
    June 2022
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  • This article focuses on the establishment of a winery on the Roman imperial estate at Vagnari in southeast Italy in the 2nd c. CE and the ceramic vats (dolia defossa) needed to mature and store the estate's vintages. A scientific analysis of the clay used to make the dolia has revealed their likely place of manufacture to have been in Latium or on the border between Latium and Campania on the Tyrrhenian (west) coast of Italy. With these analytical results in hand, it is now possible to inquire into the historical and economic significance for the imperial fiscus of importing dolia for wine making in the vicus at Vagnari, the route and mechanisms by which they might have traveled to the other side of the Italian peninsula, and the connectivity between this Apulian imperial estate and other potential imperial properties in western Italy. This places the present study at the intersection of agriculture, manufacturing, and property transfer within the patrimonium Caesaris.

  • MATER MATUTA, ‘FERTILITY CULTS’ AND THE INTEGRATION OF WOMEN IN RELIGIOUS LIFE IN ITALY IN THE FOURTH TO FIRST CENTURIES BC

  • Maureen Carroll
  • Journal:
    Papers of the British School at Rome / Volume 87 / October 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2019, pp. 1-45
    Print publication:
    October 2019

  • This study explores social and gendered aspects of female fertility in popular religious practices in Italy in the last four centuries BC, and it investigates the role of supplication and votive dedications in promoting maternal health and family continuity. It tackles modern assumptions which have strongly aligned the religious activities of women in Republican Italy with their generative interests and specific ‘fertility cults’ or ‘women's goddesses’. Divinities associated with fertility are explored here, with particular emphasis on Mater Matuta who is often defined in modern research as a ‘mother goddess’. The study shows that cults purely concerned with fertility are unlikely to have existed. Fertility was only one of several fundamental personal concerns brought by women and men to the generalist and polyvalent deities of Republican Italy. Items associated with fertility, such as terracotta wombs, male and female genitals, and swaddled infants, always occur together with other anatomical ex-votos across a wide range of sites and were dedicated to many deities. Considering the archaeological and textual evidence, Mater Matuta can be shown to have occupied a more flexible and encompassing space in the pantheon, and her involvement in marriage, motherhood and childbearing was part of a wider repertoire of responsibilities. The study also focuses attention on a distinctive, but largely overlooked, votive assemblage from Capua which includes numerous tufa statues of women and babies. The paper proposes that they should be understood as votive objects offered to an unknown deity by Capuan women as thanks for support in the generative enterprise, personally and more broadly in the context of the city's religious and civic identity.

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