Milena Melfi – författare

Sanctuaries were at the heart of Greek religious, social, political, and cultural life, however, we have a limited understanding of how sanctuary spaces, politics, and rituals intersected in the Greek cities of the Hellenistic and Republican periods. This edited collection focuses on the archaeological material of this era and how it can elucidate the complex relationship between the various forces operating on, and changing the physical space of, sanctuaries. Material such as archaeological remains, sculptures, and inscriptions provides us with concrete evidence of how sanctuaries functioned as locations of memory in a social environment dominated by the written word, and gives us insight into political choices and decisions. It also reveals changes unrecorded in surviving local or political histories. Each case study explored by this volume's contributors employs archaeology as the primary means of investigation: from art-historical approaches, to surveys and fieldwork, to re-evaluation of archival material. Hellenistic Sanctuaries represents a significant contribution to the existing bibliography on ancient Greek religion, history, and archaeology, and provides new ways of thinking about politics, rituals, and sanctuary spaces in Greece.

This volume contains a total of 21 chapters on prehistoric, ancient, and medieval medicine, presented from various perspectives. After a general introduction outlining the directions, possibilities, and methods of research in archaeology and the history of medicine in the period under review and arguing for the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, there follow 20 chapters presenting specific research topics. These chapters cover a wide chronological span, from the Stone Age to more or less the end of the Middle Ages, and geographical extent, from Western Europe through the Mediterranean (including Egypt and the Levant) to the Near East (including modern Iraq). The papers in this volume are divided into three sections, roughly spanning prehistory, the Classical era and the Middle Ages respectively.