Magic: A History by Chris Gosden

Author:Chris Gosden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Hybrid cultures in the northern Roman provinces

In north-west Europe formalized religion and religious structures, such as temples and shrines, appeared in the Roman Period for the first time (or some at the very end of the Iron Age, probably due to impulses coming from the Roman world). New temples and shrines employed priests who led more formalized modes of worship. However, careful and deliberate deposition of coins, other forms of metalwork and probably organic substances regularly occurred on temple sites.16 Powerful objects were still thrown into rivers, bogs and deposited on settlement sites following rules of care established in the Iron Age and earlier. Under Roman influence much changed: populations grew, levels of material use exploded (it is possible that the level of population and of material things only reached Roman levels again in the Tudor Period), but also towns were formed, military camps and forts were built to be connected by new roads, and villas were constructed. Much in the basic fabric of people’s lives changed. Surprisingly there were also elements of life that stayed much the same, as people across the empire made a choice to adopt new Roman ways, to resist them through maintaining old lifestyles, or to attempt to blend the old and the incoming culture into something quite new. Increasingly a blended culture emerged in places like Roman Britain, with the Roman element evident, for example, in straight roads, a more rational calculation encouraged by taxation and the imposition of bureaucracy. But older British ways persisted, not just through a reciprocal relationship with the landscape and deposition, or the continuance of Iron Age art styles to the end of the Roman Period and beyond, but also in people’s refusal to adopt the new rectangular architecture, sticking instead to their tradition of round houses.

At an even more basic level, considerable elements of the Roman landscape were laid out following Iron Age alignments. We saw that important elements of the Stonehenge landscape and of earlier Neolithic monuments were aligned on the midwinter and midsummer solstices. When Stonehenge went out of use around 1500 BCE, field systems were laid out for the first time, with the central axes of these fields often aligned with the solstices. Fields are laid out and relaid down to the end of the Roman Period in places like Britain. Although the detailed structure of the fields changed, the overall alignment did not. The agricultural landscape was a spatial arrangement, but it also had time encoded into it, possibly with important ceremonies at midwinter and midsummer. Fields were not just practical but cosmological, and this cosmology had such power it lasted for almost 2,000 years, by which time Britain had become Christian. It was not just the objects placed into the landscape that indicate magic but the very layout of the landscape itself.

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