120 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010 Figure 1. Restored Jupiter Column, Early Third Century AD Ladenburg. Lobdengau-Museum
120 RES 57/58 SPRING/AUTUMN 2010 Figure 1. Restored Jupiter column, early third century A.D. Ladenburg. Lobdengau-Museum (with original crowning group of Jupiter and a giant). R. Wiegels, Lopodunum II: Inschriften und Kultdenkmäler aus dem römischen Ladenburg am Neckar (Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss Verlag, 2000), fig. 10a. A sacred landscape The creation, maintenance, and destruction of religious monuments in Roman Germany RACHEL KOUSSER In the second to early third centuries A.D., with the tended to focus on its creation, examining issues such as establishment of the first civilian administration and a the chronology, patronage, and artistic style of individual new, more defensible border on the Roman Empire’s monuments. My analysis is more broad-ranging, northwest frontier, the landscape of Roman Germany encompassing not simply the origins but also the was transformed (Rüger 2000; Sommer 1999). Cities, mutilation, renewal, and eventual destruction of sacred towns, and legionary camps were set up, a network of objects—in essence, their full “life cycle”3—as well as roads was cut, and new land cleared for farming. Nor their relation to one another and to the landscape as a was the religious dimension of the landscape neglected. whole. I draw on visual, epigraphic, and archaeological Rather, it was enhanced through the construction of new evidence to reconstruct, insofar as possible, the historical sacred monuments such as temples, shrines, and altars contexts in which such monuments were destroyed. In (Kuhnen 1996; Künzl 1982). This monumentalization
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