This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia ...Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.
Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.
Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.
Excavating at the site of Karanis in the Egyptian Fayum in 1924, the team from the University of Michigan uncovered a cache of more than eighty animal and human bones, all of which had been decorated ...with red paint (plate 3). The substance had been applied in one or more of three designs—dots, straight lines arranged in a horizontal row and bisected by a perpendicular line, and undulating lines that curve or form other sinuous shapes. The bones are strange to look at—worn by time, with the red colorant fading to brown in places, the symbols, although repeated,
The archaeological evidence of magical practice at three sites in the Roman Mediterranean—Karanis, Amathous, and Empúries—reveals the rich com plexity and wide distribution of ritual activity. The ...case studies investigated in these pages offer vignettes situated in particular times and places, permitting us to characterize some of the features of the phenomenon at each settlement. It is clear from both the literary and archaeological record that magic, as we have defined the phenomenon, could take multiple forms and serve multiple purposes. Ritual practices may employ figurines in specific poses, lead tablets that have been inscribed with names, or
As in the cities and villages that have occupied our interest so far, there is substantial evidence for magical activities at the site of Empúries, situated on the eastern coast of Hispania ...Citerior.¹ Nine curse tablets have been discovered on the site, ranging from the fourth or third century BCE to the Roman period.² Of these tablets, the most striking examples—both archaeologically and epigraphically—derive from a monumentalized tomb excavated in the Ballesta cemetery at Empúries, which yielded three separate but related curses. A small peribolos wall in the northern area of the cemetery zone enclosed eight crema tion
Materia Magica Andrew T. Wilburn
Materia Magica,
05/2013
Book Chapter
In 1933, with excavation moving along at a swift pace, the University of Michigan team began digging under a house in the top layer of occupation. There was little that was notable about the house, ...which the excavators designated as number 165, and, in later reports, it is not singled out for any special treatment. Nor was it architecturally remarkable: its contents did not contain material more striking than typical domestic debris, the sorts of things that might be found among the other hundreds of houses cleared at the site. As excavation continued, the workmen came upon a variety of
Egypt’s rich documentary record is the result of a dry desert environment that has allowed for the preservation of papyri and other organic materials. The rest of the Mediterranean is wetter, ...resulting in the loss of comparable writ ten records. Some form of ritual manuals likely existed in many locations; the practitioners at Amathous relied on a prototype for the creation of magical artifacts at the site, and model texts were likely in use from such diverse locations as Athens, Carthage, Hadrumentum, Rome, and Cnidus.¹ We only know of the existence of these models through inscriptions on archaeological artifacts, where
The archaeology of Graeco-Roman Egypt and its sister-discipline papyrology were born together from the same colonial stew of illicit and sanctioned excavations that produced massive quantities of ...papyri and artifacts from Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1920's, a small number of researchers began to record findspots and stratigraphic levels for the artifacts that were added to the collections of their respective institutions and to produce cohesive syntheses of the papyri and other objects brought out of Egypt. The following decades, however, were marked by processual trends that solidified methodological and philosophical divides between the two disciplines as each sought to define its role in the creation of knowledge about Egypt's Graeco-Roman past. The disciplinary divide became more pronounced, so that, by the 1990's, much of the cross-disciplinary dialogue consisted of accusations of neglect for the concerns of the other field. In this paper, we address the sources of this divergence through historiographic analysis and consider interdisciplinary commonalities by exploring the mutual concern with the contextualization of papyri and artifacts. In particular, we address the spatial, temporal, ideational and textual considerations that papyrologists and archaeologists employ in their search for meaning and interpretive frameworks, as well as the investigative ramifications of objects and texts that have been stripped of their physical context. Throughout our discussion, we regard context as not merely the recognition of physical association and patterns, but as part of an investigative apparatus for creating and debating meaning within both disciplines.
Introduction Andrew T. Wilburn
Materia Magica,
05/2013
Book Chapter
Sometime around 1850, a certain Mr. Jacobini conducted excavations in the Marini vineyard, which was located along the Via Appia, just outside of the San Sebastiano gate in the Aurelian Wall at Rome. ...Over the course of the work, he came upon a badly disturbed tomb, which was, in all likelihood, a columbarium, a building that housed a large number of cremation burials, likely arranged in rows of alcoves.¹ The tomb was decorated with a mosaic of a woman and child, and contained both a large, perfectly preserved sarcophagus and sizable number of smaller urns, made of both terra-cotta and
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