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Gifts for gods topic of conference
Human sacrifice, as depicted in ancient Greek pottery, is one of the topics to be considered at the IEMA visiting scholar conference. Photo: COURTESY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Professional and amateur archaeologists, historians of the ancient, students of anthropology and those interested in religious or spiritual practice, past and present, will have the opportunity to explore intriguing aspects of the sacrifices we make to our gods when UB’s Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology (IEMA) presents its fourth visiting scholar conference.
The conference, “Worlds of Sacrifice: Exploring the Past and Present Gifts for the Gods,” will be held from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. April 16-17 in 380 Millard Fillmore Academic Center, Elliott Complex, North Campus.
The event is open to the public; the cost is free to UB faculty, staff and students; $20 for non-UB students and $30 for all others. A reception and dinner will be charged separately. Register by going to the conference registration site.
The conference will offer a fresh take on theories and theologies that hold Christ’s death to be a sacrifice; consider the various weapons and vessels used in graves as a form of gift exchange between humans and the supernatural world; discuss how Roman sacrifices were staged; the meaning of burial placement in Northern European bogs; sacrifice in the Egyptian context; and ways in which the ancient Greeks used sacrifice to reinforce social ideology.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Presenters include outstanding scholars from the U.S., Wales, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and beyond. Among them will be Jan Bremmer, noted Dutch scholar of Greek, Roman, early Christian and contemporary religion, social history and the historiography of ancient religion; Nancy T. De Grummond of Florida State University, who will consider human sacrifice among the ancient Etruscans; Michael Gargarin of the University of Texas-Austin, who will discuss the (always fascinating, arcane and complex) Greek laws on sacrifice; and UB’s Roger Woodard, Andrew V.V. Raymond Scholar, Department of Classics, a specialist in, among other things, Indo-European linguistics, who will consider the alphabet as an offering in ancient Israel.
In addition, Andrea Zeeb-Lanz will discuss her revolutionary finds from the recent excavations in Herxheim, Germany, that have revealed large-scale human sacrifice, and possibly cannibalism, and Jeffrey Schwarz from the University of Pittsburgh will present new skeletal data that re-examines whether the Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice.
Sessions also will consider contemporary sporting practices as a transformation of sacrificial practices from an anthropological perspective, the art and anthropology of sacrifice, and how forms of object, animal and human sacrifice have been used as important forms of social action.
Conference organizer Carrie A. Murray, research instructor in the Department of Classics, points out that sacrifice “is central for many societies, past and present, in cultural, religious, political and economic terms.”
“The roles, processes and meanings involved in sacrifice change over time and space, of course, but we are called upon to make sacrifices today no less than were those who lived in ancient and distant societies,” she says.
Murray points out that sacrificial practices—whether slaughtering an animal to present to a deity, donating objects at a temple or sharing bread and wine in a religious setting—embody a contradiction of sorts, creating both loss and gain in real and metaphorical terms.
“For instance,” she says, “at the conference we will look at how powerfully beliefs and performances relate to each other within different cultural contexts. Presenters also will consider how social hierarchy determines what is sacrificed, how the sacrifice is enacted and by whom it is performed.”
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