Ritual time: the seasonal calendar and religious festivals in Archaic and Republican central Italy

Abstract

Time, place, and the rhythm of the seasons, essential constituents of ancient ritual, collaboratively shaped and channeled the experience of religious performance. Focusing on agricultural and civic time reckoning, this article investigates the orientations of the monuments at the extra-mural Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium and their coordination with viticultural activities amid the shifting social and religious circumstances of the 6th and 5th c. BCE. The article will argue that the 6th- and 5th-c. altars were aligned in such a way as to face sunrise at a particular location on the horizon on two very particular days in the seasonal year. The altars at Lavinium, playing an important role in the emerging urban community's economic life, will be shown to be themselves a form of agentic seasonal timekeeping that closely determined the integration of local agricultural, religious, and economic practices.

Introduction: time – reckonings, recordings, experiences

Natural time mattered. The rhythms of earth and sky were essential constituents of ancient ritual, offering a conceptual framework for shaping and channeling the experience of religious performance and – most practically – for anchoring agriculture and its festivals to the cycles of the seasonal year. The privileging of particular seasonal recurrences provided religiously authorized coordination for economically crucial communal events and practices. If, then, time was so important for religion, for its gods, and for peoples and places, how do we begin to make sense of the material structuring of this temporal aspect of ritual practice?

In this article, I will show how the sacrificial altars at the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars in Lavinium were deliberately oriented to specific solar events recurring on specific days in the annual course of the seasons in order to signal the start and celebration of particular viticultural activities, in response to the changing social and religious circumstances of the 6th and 5th c. BCE. The article will begin with an introduction to some basic conceptions of time and seasonal calendars, followed by an explanation of methods (and software) adopted from the field of archaeoastronomy; it will then move to a detailed exploration of the architecture of the 6th-c. BCE altars and the categorizations of the types and functions of the archaeological finds excavated at these altars, highlighting their particular connection to wine. The final sections of this article will turn to a briefer, complementary discussion of the second construction phase at the site and its connection to a communal wine ritual in the 5th c. This article will ultimately show how the altars and their specific orientations, along with the marked viticultural character of the associated archaeological finds, were themselves a form of ritual, seasonal timekeeping that closely determined the way local agricultural, religious, and economic practices were integrated for one particular emerging community.

Time and timekeeping: calendars and seasons

In early Italy, an annual “calendar” was experienced as a series of somewhat movable festivals tied to the cycle of the seasons.¹ Religious authorities in different places would determine the timing of the communal festivals specific to their local seasonal circumstances, basing their judgments, at least partly, on some degree of astronomical knowledge and observation. For early Italy, then, calendars were decidedly local and place specific, though with, of course, certain commonalities.² Even with some underlying cognate aspects, the particular character of the lived experience and reckonings of time would necessarily depend on who was experiencing what and arguably, most of all, on the where of the occurrence.

If place is so important to ritual time, and if calendars in this period in Italy were not conceptually or materially “fixed,” then the “repeated cycles of various celestial bodies” would have provided the necessary “temporal markers of excellent reliability.”³ This attention to stellar and solar phases creates, in effect, “seasonal calendars,”⁴ methods of agronomically effective timekeeping that conveyed the rhythm of the year not by numerical dates in a fixed, material calendar but rather by linking recurring festivals and agricultural seasons with places on the horizon and celestial events. At Lavinium, as this article will argue, we see just this kind of entanglement of regularly repeating human and natural phenomena: monumental emplacement, religious festival, and agricultural harvest and processing, all contingent on the close correlation between the course of the seasonal year and the annual cyclical passage of the rising Sun along the horizon.

Ritual and the sky: archaeoastronomy models

Some early attempts at the archaeoastronomy of the ancient world have been criticized as “naïve” and “uncontextualized alignment studies,” insufficiently attentive to the human and material circumstances of time and place.⁵ In the last 10–15 years, however, integrated investigations of religious spaces, ritual practice, and archaeoastronomy of ancient Greece, Etruria, and Rome and the later Empire have come to play an important part in the larger study of ritual places and actions of the ancient world.⁶

Many of these studies situate analyses of, for example, temple alignments within a larger discussion about how and why specific social entities in particular social, cultural, and temporal contexts might have made their architectural dispositions as they did, taking “orientation data into consideration but only as one aspect of the range of available evidence.”⁷ Alignments of religious structures need to be considered not in isolation but in the context of cultural, historical, and geographical specificities, integrating material evidence, if possible, with textual or epigraphic testimony. It is just this more holistic, contextual approach that the present study takes as its model, offering a connected account of the orientations of the 6th- and 5th-c. BCE altars at Lavinium, the associated finds excavated at the altars, local and regional topography, relevant socioeconomic circumstances, and mythological traditions. Before we turn to this emplaced study of the altars’ orientations, we first need to look briefly at the architecture of the site itself and thoroughly understand how the numerical data for the orientations were obtained.

Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars: construction history and methodology

The Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium was first excavated in 1957, with continuous excavation during the 1960s by Ferdinando Castagnoli and Lucos Cozza, culminating in a two-volume report (Lavinium I, 1972 and Lavinium II, 1975). There have been sporadic excavation campaigns in the last 50 years, most recently with Stefania Panella's work in 2004–5 and again in 2009.⁸

The 13 altars at Lavinium were built in four different construction phases from the 6th to the 4th c. BCE (Fig. 1). The first building phase, in the early 6th c. BCE, saw the construction of altars XIII, VIII, and IX, all at the same orientation. A 6th-c. structure adjacent to these first three altars, which may have served as a production or storage facility, had the same alignment as the 6th-c. altars.⁹ In the next phase of construction, in the mid-5th c. BCE, altars I, II, III, IV, and V were built at a distance of 8.22 m from altar VIII; these new altars shared a new orientation, a conspicuous divergence in alignment from that of the original altars. The next building phase, altars VI and VII, constructed in the late 5th to mid-4th c., returned to the orientation of the original first three 6th-c. altars. And finally, the construction of altars X, XI, and XII in the late 4th c., also at the original orientation, filled the gap between altars IX and XIII. There have been numerous scholarly attempts over the years to explain the significance of the sanctuary as, for example, a cult site dedicated to Venus or the Penates, or one in which each altar represents a city of the Latin League or stands in for a month of the calendar.¹⁰ This article will take a different approach and instead suggest a close correlation between the 13 altars and the celebration of a particular complex of agricultural and viticultural events.

Fig. 1. Plan of the phases of the 13 altars. (After Enea nel Lazio 1981, modified by author.)

Methodology

An accurate, geo-rectified plan of the sanctuary was created by a team from the British School at Rome in collaboration with the author in 2012 (Fig. 2).¹¹ The 13 altars are currently housed in a modern shed, thus precluding a survey using highly accurate differential global positioning system equipment (DGPS), which would require a direct signal from satellites. However, a detailed total station survey was completed, tracing the outlines of the foundations, bases, bodies, and moldings on each of the altars. These points were then tied into a DGPS survey of the landscape outside the modern shed, allowing real-world coordinates of the monuments to be accurately mapped and geo-referenced.

Fig. 2. Plan of Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars. (After Moser and Hay 2013.)

In the field, the foundations, bases, bodies, and moldings of each altar were surveyed by taking multiple points along the monument. When these data from the field survey were later imported into an ArcGIS database, azimuths of lines drawn between data points were calculated (“azimuth,” here and throughout this article, refers to the orientation expressed as a horizontal angle, in degrees, measured eastward from north; so, for example, the azimuth of North is 0°, East is 90°, Northeast is 45°, and so on).¹² Due to conditions in the field and the present robbed-out state of some of the extant altars, lines produced from the survey data were not always exactingly straight and the points taken did not necessarily accurately reflect the form of the original monuments as they would have been constructed in the 6th–4th c. BCE. Therefore, a representative average was obtained by taking azimuths of three lines for each of the 13 altars: the northern, eastern, and southern lines formed where the platform of the altars meets the plinth, or torus, or echinus moldings of the altars (see Figure 3a–b for the positions of the data points).¹³ Ideally, for each monument, each of these three lines should share – directly or at a right angle – the same azimuth. Where multiple points were taken in the survey along one of these lines, resulting in multiple azimuth readings, the average of these readings along the line was computed. The numerical averaged azimuth for each altar was then computed from the average of the three lines.

Fig. 3. Data point locations for (a) Altar I; (b) Altar IX. (Data from plan of Sophie Hay, generated by Aaron Gidding, 2022.)

The resulting final azimuth numbers for each altar were very close, ranging from 71.42° to 72.13° for altars VI–XIII, and from 76.03° to 77.36° for altars I–V. Finally, an average of the azimuths for each of the two phases of the altars was calculated, producing an average azimuth of 71.73° for altars VI–XIII and 76.86° for altars I–V. The investigation below (of both the orientations and the archaeological finds) primarily focuses on the first phase of the altars (those constructed in the early 6th c. BCE). The votive materials and orientation of the second phase of the altars are then brought into the argument as complementary support and explanation.

The averaged azimuth (71.73°) for the first phase of the altars, together with related geographical data for the location of the sanctuary and for the angle of elevation of the point in the azimuthal direction of the sanctuary's horizon, was entered into Stellarium v. 23.2, a planetarium software, for the phase 1 representative year 575 BCE. Stellarium output data are arrived at by fine-tuning the input settings of an animated “skyscape” as viewed over the surface of a terrain by a user placed at eye height.¹⁴

Dates and times were obtained from Stellarium for the twice annual (spring and late summer) sunrise at the orientation of the altars. The locational data – longitude, latitude, and elevation of the sanctuary, and the respective distance and altitude of the azimuthal horizon point – were obtained from Google Earth Pro (v.7.3.6.9345) data and a DEM.¹⁵ The angle of elevation (the upward angle at which a viewer at the altars looking in the azimuthal direction would see the rising Sun cresting the distant horizon on the Alban Hills) was computed to be 1.86°. Taking into account the outputted apparent diameter of the Sun (radius about 0.26°) and employing Stellarium's default empirical corrections both for atmospheric effects and for irregularities over time in the Earth's rotation, the user can manually adjust the date and time inputs, thus obtaining the software's corresponding computed output for the estimated times and astronomical circumstances of the two days of the year when a viewer at the sanctuary's latitude, longitude, and elevation would see the upper limb of the Sun appear at a point on the horizon where the azimuth and the altitude of the Sun's center would coincide as closely as practicable with target azimuth, 71.73°, and altitude, 1.6°.

Plugins such as “ArchaeoLines,” which allows for an archaeological simulation to show azimuth indicator lines, have made Stellarium a popular platform for archaeological simulations.¹⁶ The software accepts user input of custom “background landscapes” – wide-angle, artificial renderings of the horizon topography – to create a simulation of how the horizon would have looked and been experienced from a particular viewpoint.¹⁷ I created such a horizon image for the latitude, longitude, and elevation of the site at Lavinium.

The sunrise results at Lavinium

With Stellarium, I was searching for the date of a sunrise as viewed in a particular direction from a particular location in a particular year.¹⁸ At the azimuth of the earliest, 6th-c. BCE group of altars (71.7°, rounded), these monuments are oriented to the Sun rising over a very particular point – 938 m in elevation on the Alban Hills, 27 km away (Fig. 4) – on a very particular day in late summer of the seasonal year. Using the ArchaeoLines plugin, we can note to an appropriate level of precision the intersection between the azimuth line (71.7), the altitude line (1.6), and the line of declination of the path of the Sun (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4. Digital elevation model (DEM). Azimuth line from the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars to the Alban Hills. (Drawing by Aaron Gidding, 2022.)

Fig. 5. Stellarium sunrise on August 22, 575 BCE (proleptic) Julian with ArchaeoLines plugin. The vertically disposed curve represents the projection of the azimuth line (71.7°) onto the celestial sphere; the horizontally disposed curve represents the projection of the altitude line (1.6°); and the intermediate curve represents the line of declination of the path of the Sun.

This particular sunrise, with the upper limb of the Sun appearing over the horizon at this particular azimuth and altitude, occurs on August 22, 575 BCE in the (astronomers’ proleptic) Julian calendar (Fig. 6).¹⁹ This date does not neatly translate to August 22 in our Gregorian calendar. Therefore, in order to compare a proleptic Julian date with the Julian dates of festivals as reported in Late Republican and Augustan period calendars and texts, the proleptic dates can be given in relation to equinoxes or solstices. Thus, proleptic August 22 in 575 BCE would have occurred 38 days before the astronomical autumnal equinox on September 29.²⁰ Following Columella and Pliny, as well as agricultural calendars of the 1st c. CE,²¹ I take the conventional Augustan-era calendar autumnal equinox date to be September 24 (VIII Kal. Oct.).²² And taking this September 24 as the autumn equinoctial date, the equivalent Augustan-era calendar date of the sunrise of 38 days earlier would be August 17. Strikingly, this date, when translated from our Stellarium results into the equinoctial date conventions of the Julian calendar as reported in the agronomic literature, differs by only two days²³ from the date, August 19, of an important traditional agricultural festival noted in later Republican and Imperial fasti and texts: the Vinalia Rustica.²⁴

Fig. 6. Stellarium sunrise on August 22, 575 BCE (proleptic) Julian.

The Vinalia Rustica

Traditionally, on August 19 (pre-Julian and continuing to the Julian period), the Vinalia Rustica celebrated (in some way) the start of the autumn harvest season, culminating eight months later with the Vinalia Priora in April (the first tasting of the new wine, discussed later in this article).²⁵ There has been much scholarship on both what this August festival actually entailed and to which deity it was dedicated, alternatively to Jupiter, Liber, or Venus.²⁶ Olivier de Cazanove argues cogently that the autumn harvest consisted of two separate rituals: the first, a fixed festival (Vinalia Rustica), ensuring the prospering and protection of the grapes from bad weather in their final phase of maturation; and the second, a movable festival, the actual beginning of the harvesting of the grapes (auspicari vindemiam), depending variably on the local weather, the location of the vines, or the type of grape and the desired type of wine.²⁷

We cannot be sure exactly when the predecessors of the canonical Roman Vinalia Rustica and Vinalia Priora were first introduced to central Italy, but we have some evidence that suggests the early importance of this wine festival typology to the peoples of Latium. Our earliest secure calendar dates for the Vinalia Rustica and Priora come from the Late Republican Fasti Antiates. We could reasonably argue, however, for a canonical Vinalia as early as the mid-Republic:²⁸ Jörg Rüpke maintains that the Fasti Antiates was modeled “down to the last detail” on the calendar of M. Fulvius Flaccus; the Fasti Antiates thus follows a model from at least the 4th c. BCE.²⁹

We can also look to later texts both for the importance of wine more generally to the region and for the celebration of wine festivals in connection with traditional lore of the Lavinian region.³⁰ For example, a number of later ancient authors confirm that wine was grown around the area of Lavinium at some point in antiquity,³¹ and evidence from a recent botanical study in the area shows that vines were cultivated there.³² More immediately related to the Vinalia, a number of aetiological myths associate Aeneas and his Etruscan antagonist, Mezentius, with the origins of the festival.³³ Olivier de Cazanove interprets (rightly, I believe) the oft-noted confusion of the two seasonal Vinalia reported in Latin literature to mean that both Mezentius's reference to his right to the grape on the vine and Aeneas's vow to Jupiter took place not on April's Vinalia Priora (as Ovid reports)³⁴ but rather on August's Vinalia Rustica, before the harvesting of the grapes, promising Jupiter the wine that would come from the imminent harvest in the following weeks.³⁵ Therefore, at least in the writings and minds of the early Empire, there is some idea (albeit highly mythologized) that a harvest-time Vinalia of some kind was an established ritual at the time of legendary Aeneas. And, indeed, a core of historicity to these legends linking Mezentius and wine ritual is materially evidenced by an Etruscan impasto calice (a large-handled, footed wine cup) from the second quarter of the 7th c. BCE, from Caere, with Mezentius inscribed on the body.³⁶

Archaeological finds at Altars XIII, IX, and VIII (Stratum D)

If the 6th-c. altars at Lavinium are indeed oriented to a sunrise that marked the celebration of the Vinalia Rustica, then we would expect there to be finds at these early altars associated with the character of this specific festival. The following section will investigate the types of finds excavated in the stratum associated with these altars. The discussion will then move to a brief comparison with excavated material from two contemporary nearby sanctuaries, Satricum and S. Omobono, to see how what we find at Lavinium is distinct from neighboring sacred deposits.

In the late 1960s, the area around each altar was carefully excavated, and the finds that could be associated with each stratum were documented in detail. Stratum E is the pre-altar phase of the area and Stratum A is that of the last use of the structures.³⁷ The 6th-c. stratum corresponding with the earliest phase of the altars is Stratum D. For the most part, material from each stratum was found at all of the built altars or in the unbuilt spaces surrounding yet-to-be-constructed altars, suggesting the sanctuary's continuous use over the three centuries. The exceptional thoroughness of the excavation record allows us to study the finds related to specific altars and strata and to distinguish patterns and anomalies.

There is a degree of consistency within the assemblage from all phases at the sanctuary. The finds throughout all strata are of quite common types and fall into categories of what we would generally expect in Late Archaic and Republican sanctuary deposits throughout central Italy. The majority of the items belong to a familiar range of basic types – domestic ceramics, terracotta statuettes, bronze figurines, and anatomical votives. However, within this overall pattern, at the group of the first, 6th-c. altars, there is something more particular: a great prevalence of finds strongly connected with wine drinking. In Stratum D, fragments representing 186 Italic ware vessels have been recorded in local bucchero, depurated or partially sandy clay, and impasto. Out of these vessel fragments, two types conspicuously predominate: the bucchero kantharos (20%) (a ceremoniously high, two-handled wine drinking cup) and the impasto olla, a jar (20%) (Fig. 7). The Lavinian kantharoi are largely bucchero (Fig. 8) and belong to Rasmussen Type 3A (Ramage Type 5A),³⁸ one of the earliest forms of kantharos, dating to the last quarter of the 7th c., with a low ring foot, handles that are round in section, and a carination (without notches).³⁹ As for the olle, the excavators at Lavinium report fragments of two preponderant impasto olla types from Stratum D: the globular olla, often in impasto rosso-bruno, and the paracylindrical (or ovoid) olla (Fig. 9a–b).⁴⁰

Fig. 7. Chart of local vessels in Stratum D. (Chart by author.)

Fig. 8. Kantharos from Lavinium. Dimensions: 7 x 5.2 cm. (After Castagnoli 1975, cat. no. 230.)

Fig. 9. Globular olle from Lavinium ((a) after Castagnoli 1975, cat. no. 125, dimensions: 3.5 x 3.2 cm; (b) after Castagnoli 1975, cat. no. 357, dimensions: 5.5 x 3.3 cm).

In addition to the local pottery in Stratum D, fragments of imported vessels were also found. These foreign wares were unique to this stratum (with the exception of one red-figure vase found in Stratum C). Complementing the emphasis on drinking evident in the domestic vessel types, out of the 41 imported vessels in this stratum (which make up 18% of Stratum D's total assemblage), only six are not cups.⁴¹ The variety of imported cups found – Siana cups, Lip cups, Eye cups – as well as two dinoi (mixing bowls for wine drinking), reinforces the connection of Stratum D's ceramic assemblage to wine. If we combine the data of the imported vessel types with the assemblage data from the domestic forms, then the overall assemblage of imported and domestic finds in Stratum D shows an overwhelming majority of cups (of all types) (38%), strongly suggesting the connection of wine drinking with the religious practices of the early sanctuary (Fig. 10). A lack of residue testing means we cannot know for sure if these cups held wine during the ritual, but given the functionality and full size of the vessels, we can arguably consider these deposits as objects that would actually have been used, perhaps as part of a communal celebration or as vessels for libation, and not simply buried.⁴²

Fig. 10. Chart of Stratum D with imported vessels and cups. (Chart by author.)

Wine: the kantharos and the olla

At the time of the first phase of the altars, in Etruria especially and throughout central Italy, wine drinking and its representations asserted and affirmed “a politico-cultural identity” or “social standing”;⁴³ this was a period when a “codification of ritualised drinking” at tombs and sanctuaries coincided with a “specialised understanding of the divine.”⁴⁴ In the 7th and 6th c. BCE, with an increase in the cultivation, processing, and exchange of wine connected to social status, central Italy saw the end-use of wine-drinking vessels moving from aristocratic, elite, personal gift-giving and funerary practices to, in the 6th c., objects of non-elite donatives to deities in urban or emporia sanctuaries.⁴⁵ Wine during this period plays a prominent role in cultural interactions, facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas both intra- and inter-regionally.⁴⁶

Certain vessels – like the kantharos and the olla found in Stratum D at Lavinium – were especially connected to wine drinking and emblematic of the practice's social significance in 6th-c. society. We will see later in this article how other shapes and sizes of vessels connected to wine were emblematic of the social circumstances of the 5th c.

The Bucchero kantharos

The high-handled kantharos in particular played a unique part in the material expression of elite social relations in urbanizing central Italy – a banqueting and ritual vessel set apart, in form and in representation, from low-handled types (kylikes, for example). Kantharoi appear in Latium, in different varieties, as early as the end of the 8th c. BCE, and later in Etruria, in the first half of the 7th c. BCE, commonly in tombs, and seemingly distinct from any related development in the Greek world.⁴⁷ These vessels were found occasionally in wealthy funerary contexts of the 6th c., as they had been, in greater quantity, in the previous century; in this later period, however, they were more often encountered as votives in urban sanctuaries such as at Tarquinia,⁴⁸ or in images of non-funerary banqueting.⁴⁹

Quite possibly preceding and influencing the Attic kantharoi of the later 6th c.,⁵⁰ the Italic bucchero kantharos was a vessel reserved for special, highly social occasions. Its high handles, for example, demanded skilled craftsmanship (particularly in the case of a thin, fine ware, such as bucchero sottile), and it has been argued that these handles worked to accentuate the “convivial” associations of the cup, calling for it to be passed from one diner to the next.⁵¹ In the 6th c., the Italic kantharos, a “prestige” ware,⁵² was often exported along with amphora, thus becoming a vessel with both a “transactional value” and a ritual value.⁵³

The 6th-c. olla at Lavinium

Just as the assemblage of bucchero kantharoi at Lavinium conveys the elite status of wine drinking in the 6th-c. urbanizing world of Lavinium, so too, perhaps, can the other prevalent find in the stratum of the early altars, the common-ware impasto olla (or jar), suggest a socially broader ritual role for wine at the altars in this period. While the kantharos was always designated as a vessel for wine, the olla was not exclusively for wine, and could be seen to take on many distinct roles depending on its particular form and the location and context of the find; for example, the olla could be linked to cooking, or could hold first fruits or grain.⁵⁴ The jar as a miniature vessel was also quite common in the Early Iron Age and Archaic periods.⁵⁵ Viewed out of context, the versatile olla might not necessarily suggest uses specifically linked to wine; however, taken together with the kantharoi and fine-ware imports in Stratum D, the presence of these modest jars serves to amplify the viticultural character of the 6th-c. assemblage.

The olla's large mouth made it a particularly useful vessel for holding liquids: water, it would seem, in more ancient periods,⁵⁶ but most significantly, at later banquets or symposia, a mixture of wine and water (and in representations of banquets, as well, we can see olle, at times high-footed, employed as serving vessels).⁵⁷ In its role as a container for wine, the olla was a predecessor to the crater (but derived independently from the morphology of the Greek crater),⁵⁸ and olle often appear in assemblages with drinking cups or with other vases for mixing or drinking, such as small kyathoi or calices.

A comparison of ceramic finds: Lavinium, S. Omobono, and Satricum

Certainly, we need to acknowledge that multi-purpose vessels for eating and drinking (such as cups and jars) are fairly common finds, evident in the deposits of many sanctuaries during the 6th c. BCE.⁵⁹ But through a comparison with select contemporary sanctuary deposits in central Italy, we can see that the preference at Lavinium for drinking cups (particularly kantharoi) over other types of vessels marks this assemblage in Stratum D at the altars as exceptional. The votive deposits at S. Omobono, directly in front of the altar of Temple B, and the deposits from Votive Deposit II and earlier pits throughout Satricum (near the temple but not directly in front of an altar) provide excellent comparanda based on their neighboring geographic locations in Latium, their phases of construction being contemporary to the altars at Lavinium (each sanctuary also having both pre-monumental and later Republican phases), and the continuous phases of votive deposition over multiple centuries. The ceramic assemblages from all three sites have been thoroughly studied.

In the 6th-c. deposits in front of the Archaic altar at S. Omobono (Sectors II and IV), the two predominant vessel shapes in impasto rosso-bruno are the bowl (and cover) and the olla.⁶⁰ Colonna notes that at S. Omobono, the most common type of olla is the cylindrical-ovoid shape.⁶¹ Regoli also remarks on the frequency of this particular shape of olla at S. Omobono and at other sites in central Italy and notes that some of the olla at S. Omobono had traces of burning.⁶² In the early 5th-c. Votive Deposit II at Satricum, as well, the cylindrical-ovoid olla is the predominant vessel type, along with the bowl,⁶³ and in the early 6th-c. deposits from the same site, there is a prevalence of vessels connected to cooking (over those for eating and drinking).⁶⁴ This particular type of olla at Satricum has been linked not to serving wine, but rather to cooking and to meat offerings, based on the associated charcoal and faunal remains found in the same context and even within some jars.⁶⁵

In contrast to the finds at Lavinium, at both Satricum and S. Omobono, there are almost no cups. At S. Omobono, Regoli categorizes only seven fragments of cups, compared to the 150 or so of bowls and jars in this same assemblage; at Satricum in Votive Deposit II, a total of only six kantharoi were found in all of the strata, and these are from later contexts.⁶⁶ In addition, 6th-c. sanctuary deposits in central Italy commonly have numerous miniature vessels: for example, at S. Maria della Vittoria, Lapis Niger, and the Capitoline deposit in Rome.⁶⁷ This is certainly true of the S. Omobono deposits, in which, after olla and bowl, the next most frequent category of finds from these two trenches is that of miniature vessels, again primarily in the shape of bowls and jars.⁶⁸ And the early 6th-c. votive deposits at Satricum also have many miniature vessels, particularly in the form of olle, handled jars, bowls, mugs, cups, and plates.⁶⁹

But at Lavinium's Thirteen Altars, somewhat surprisingly, miniature vessels are nearly absent in the 6th-c. stratum. This absence is made even more remarkable by the presence of other large assemblages of miniature vessels at sanctuaries in Lavinium. For example, at the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars itself, in Stratum C (the later 5th-c. phase), miniature craters are very popular deposits, as will be discussed below.⁷⁰ And contemporary with Stratum D, from the second half of the 7th to the beginning of the 6th c. BCE at the neighboring sanctuary at Lavinium, the so-called Northeast Sanctuary, there is an overwhelming majority of miniature olle: over 30,000 fragments and over 1,500 intact miniature vessels.⁷¹

From this brief comparison of the patterns of finds at nearby sites, we can clearly note that – regionally speaking – there is something anomalous about the ceramic assemblage at Lavinium. Only this assemblage has such a large presence of drinking vessels, in comparison with the more common bowls that we see at S. Omobono and at Satricum. It can also be noted that the near complete absence of the miniature vessel, examples of which were popular in the Archaic deposits at S. Omobono and Satricum (and, arguably, throughout 6th-c. sanctuary deposits in Latium), further highlights the predominantly viticultural, drinking-related character of the finds at Lavinium. Independently of the orientation of the 6th-c. altars at Lavinium, then, the character and quality of the ceramic depositions taken together with the monumentality of the altars would suggest an elite involvement with the religious coordination of wine-related practices. Yet this conspicuous elite character of the 6th-c. Lavinian sanctuary, as I will argue in the next section, would take a turn in a more communal direction in the 5th c. BCE.

The complete bi-annual wine festival at Lavinium: explaining the 5th-c. shift in orientation

This study has so far argued, using depositional, topographic, and literary evidence, as well as, above all, altar placement, for a correlation between the orientation of the first set of 6th-c. Lavinian altars and an annual sunrise occurring at a distinct location on the horizon in the Alban Hills that signaled the celebration of an archetypal Vinalia Rustica in the later part of August. But the phenomenon of the Sun rising at a particular point on the horizon occurs not just once but twice annually. We will now turn, as a complement to our detailed discussion of the 6th-c. BCE celebration of the Vinalia Rustica, to a brief investigation of the significance of this second annual sunrise and the concomitant implications for communal religious festivals at Lavinium.

We have already established that at the azimuth of 71.7° of the early altars, the Sun rises over the horizon 38 days before the fall equinox, a solar date within two days of August 19, which marks the celebration of the Vinalia Rustica in later Roman calendars. The other, complementary sunrise that would have been observed in the spring of this same year, 575 BCE, at this same orientation and location on the horizon in the Alban Hills, occurred on May 6 (proleptic Julian), about 40 days after the spring equinox (which took place on March 27 in the 6th c. BCE).⁷² This date corresponds to May 4 in the calendar of the Augustan period,⁷³ 40 days after the Julian equinox conventionally occurring on calendar date March 25, according to 1st-c. CE calendars and literary sources.⁷⁴ Curiously, this date is about two weeks off from the date of the corresponding spring festival of the new vintage, the Vinalia Priora, held on April 23 in the Augustan calendar.⁷⁵ For a community so seemingly meticulous in its concern for coordinating the orientation of the 6th-c. altars to sunrise on the date of the fall wine festival, a two-week difference for the spring festival is quite surprising and calls for an explanation.

Proposing an explanation

As mentioned above, around 450 BCE, a line of altars, I–V, was added at an orientation different from that of the first three altars and at a distance of 8.22 m from the earlier structures (altar VIII to altar V) (Fig. 1). This new set of altars is oriented to an azimuth of 76.9°, a 5.2° shift further south from the alignment of altars XIII, VIII, and IX. The altars of this later, second set of monuments are all closely related to each other in basic design, incorporating new 5th-c. developments in style, while at the same time recalling the form of the earlier structures. Given the close similarity in form and construction of these later, 5th-c. altars to their 6th-c. predecessors, the shift in orientation is all the more striking. Central Italic builders were exactingly precise in matters of architectural alignment, and a difference as substantial as 5.2° cannot be satisfactorily accounted for as a mere error in calculation or construction.

Perhaps altars I–V were meant to echo and complement their predecessors in a more significant way than just style. If, as discussed above, the sunrise at the azimuth of the 6th-c. altars failed to correspond closely enough to the seasonal timing of the Vinalia Priora – the spring counterpart festival to the late summer Vinalia Rustica – perhaps the builders of the next phase of the altars sought to remedy the inconvenience of this misalignment by creating a new set of altars that would signal the proper seasonal timing of the communal spring wine festival.⁷⁶

At the azimuth of the new 5th-c. altars, 76.9°, the monuments would face a sunrise over the horizon in the Alban Hills that occurred on April 23 (proleptic Julian),⁷⁷ a date 28 days after the spring equinox (which occurred in 450 BCE on March 26) (Fig. 11).⁷⁸ Again, when we count the days between the sunrise and equinox events we see a number strikingly close – a difference of only one day – to the figure obtained by reckoning the number of days between the conventional spring equinox calendar date (which, as noted above, fell on March 25) and the calendar date of an important wine festival, the Vinalia Priora, celebrated in the later Augustan period on the Julian calendar date of April 23.⁷⁹

Fig. 11. Stellarium sunrise on April 23, 450 BCE (proleptic) Julian.

In scholarship on the wine harvest, the two festivals are always linked – the start and the end of the eight-month harvest season. But if the 5th-c. altars were in fact correlated with sunrise on the Vinalia Priora, the question must certainly be raised as to whether the Vinalia Priora had a place at Lavinium before the mid-5th c. In wine-making, the harvest and its processing go hand in hand. We certainly do not have any manifest reason to suppose that the Vinalia Priora was introduced later than the Vinalia Rustica to central Italy, nor that the Vinalia Priora was ignored or passed over in an earlier period. Rather, as I will argue below, the reoriented second phase of the altars suggests a Vinalia Priora emerging from a Lavinian religious community quite distinct in its practices from those contemporary with the first phase of the sanctuary's monumentalization. We see, in turn, this 5th-c. sanctuary community displacing older practices with new ones; in their more communal character, these new practices had greater traction with, and were better suited to, the shifting religious concerns and circumstances of an urbanizing, collective mid-5th-c. society.

As this article has maintained, the careful correlation between the orientation of the monumental 6th-c. altars and the start of the autumn vintage can be seen to highlight the scale of the Late Archaic investment in the managed coordination of harvest activities occurring at a time when Roman religious festivals are believed to have been intimately tied in general to agricultural interests.⁸⁰ In the religious sphere, it was a period when agroeconomic expansion shaped worshippers’ behaviors and relationships with the gods, as Riva argues, a time when agricultural surplus “became a means of exchange between worshippers and deity that cut across social boundaries.”⁸¹ At Lavinium, then, the first three altars and their rituals superintend a crucial early phase of the integrative socioeconomic process of becoming urban, of crafting the conditions necessary for the formation of the Lavinian city and of its heterarchical community, part of “the time of making the city rather than of being a city.”⁸²

But with the region's shifts in the social, political, material, and religious circumstances of the 5th c. BCE, the second phase of the Lavinian altars, connected now with the more pervasively communal spring Vinalia Priora, represents a case of Lavinian participation in a region-wide, religion-mediated, political and social transformation. In the 5th c., religion becomes, as Fay Glinister has argued, a “major arena for elite competition,”⁸³ sacred space becomes contested, and aristocratic competition develops around temple foundations and major priesthoods. But despite these contests over religious control (or in fact because of them), there prevailed an overarching sense that cults and priesthoods belonged and responded more to the broader community.⁸⁴ Christopher Smith has argued quite convincingly that the 5th c. represents a turn to communal action, that there was at this time a prioritization of the community over competing individual interests, that religion was “referring symbolically to the interests of the community,” with “elite” and “audience” working together.⁸⁵ We begin to see this growth of community integration in the 5th c., creating something that “rebooted Roman society as something distinctly different from what had gone before,”⁸⁶ something with increased “participation in the urban community through religion.”⁸⁷ And perhaps, therefore, we can see the Vinalia Priora as a response to these new shifting priorities.

Archaeological finds connected with Altars I–V

If in fact the 5th-c. altars, I–V, were designed to be more closely aligned with the sunrise on the horizon in coordination with the spring wine festival, the Vinalia Priora, we would then expect that, as in the case of the 6th-c. altars, the materials found in connection – proximally and chronologically – with these later altars would likewise show a strong emphasis on wine drinking and a new emphasis on communal practice.

A total of 111 miniature craters (Fig. 12) were found in Stratum C, representing the significant majority of the vessels excavated in this stratum (53%) (Fig. 13).⁸⁸ In its full-sized version, the crater was a vessel type – frequently fine-ware – used for mixing wine and water, playing a central role at a symposium or banquet, and, in the Greek world, often seen in gift-giving contexts.⁸⁹ The full-sized crater appears in funerary assemblages in central Italy connected to the consumption of wine in the Villanovan period, as early as the mid-8th c. BCE, both as Greek imports and as locally crafted variations; it was likewise depicted in banquet scenes on vases, its presence diminishing in later times, when it was displaced by the olla.⁹⁰

Fig. 12. Miniature craters from Lavinium. Dimensions: cat. no. 101 – h. 6.2 cm, diam. lip 5.4 cm, diam. foot 3.4 cm; cat. no. 102 – h. 5.6 cm, diam. lip 4.2 cm, diam. foot 2.8 cm; cat. no. 103 – h. 5 cm, diam. lip 4.8 cm, diam. foot 3.5 cm; cat. no. 104 h. 5.8 cm, diam. lip 6.5 cm, diam. foot 3.3 cm. (After Castagnoli 1975, cat. nos. 101–4).

Fig. 13. Chart of Stratum C finds. (Chart by author.)

If the Vinalia Priora was a festival seasonally timed to optimize readiness for the first tasting of the new wine, if it was a festival grounded in a newly heterarchical community of interests vested in the outcome of the vintage, we may easily infer the practical necessity of having some kind of large fine-ware ceremonial and communal vessel (like the traditional, but no longer fashionable, elite crater) holding the place of honor as the visual focus of the ritual. Although lacking actual evidence in Stratum C for such a full-scale model, we may nonetheless imagine how the deposition of the miniature craters might have functioned as allusive individual responses to the ceremonial communal distribution of the first samplings of the annual vintage from a venerable large-sized crater.⁹¹ The reduction in size of the full-scale model allows a larger public to access the celebration of the vintage, providing more individuals with more opportunities to participate in the ceremony. As discussed earlier in this article, miniatures were a popular phenomenon in 7th-c. and particularly 6th-c. central Italy, and Bouma observes that miniature vessels lost their popularity during the 6th c. and are quite rare in later periods.⁹² At the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium, we see just the opposite phenomenon: miniature vessels are nearly absent from the 6th-c. stratum at this Sanctuary, but exceedingly popular in the 5th-c. stratum.

With these diminutive votives therefore out of place in terms of both scale and time period, their distancing from practical use serves to amplify the effect of their role in the ritual as reductive representations.⁹³ As miniature models, the craters replicated salient features of their ancestral full-size, notionally monumental versions, singling out certain aspects as iconic while ignoring others. And through this very process of selective miniaturization, these religious instruments become active objects, having an effect on both those who viewed them and those who used them, eliciting from offerers memories and inferences about their monumental model and its function in the ritual.⁹⁴ The value of these 5th-c. miniature craters, then, lies not in their use as emblems of outmoded elite banqueting and funerary practices but rather in the entanglements or metonymic networks (to borrow Knappett's idea) these material agents engender among the offerer, the priest-led ritual, and the communal aspects of the wine.⁹⁵ The downscaling of an older fine-ware type in size, fabric quality, craftmanship, and consumer marketability clearly would have allowed for and invited broad, communal, and individual inclusion in the material character of the elite rituals of the early urban community at Lavinium. Through their part in negotiating the priorities of a new urban community, these were no longer top-down, rustic wine rituals dictated and micromanaged by an elite priesthood. With the miniature crater and the public celebration of the vintage, everyone, in some sense, got to be priest and not just audience.

Conclusion

At the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium, a detailed analysis of the ceramic finds, a survey of the topographic situation, and an examination of relevant literary sources, together with a study of the orientation of the first and second groups of altars with respect to particular annual sunrise events, combine to argue for complementary August and April festivals coinciding with seasonally recurring practices in wine production. At Lavinium we see a continued, yet differentiated, emphasis on a ritual connected to wine production (in the 6th c.) and consumption (in the 5th c.). What we have, then, is evidence of the deliberate management of local monumental religious construction in urbanizing, early 6th–5th-c. BCE central Italy in such a way as to create a broadly accessible and practical seasonal calendar responsive to the changing religious and societal ideals of that time. In their combined effect, the reiterative ensemble of altars became both agent and instrument, a religiously authorized reference framework for the coordination of significant seasonally recurring agricultural and economic practices. And, in its individuality, each altar – not merely functioning as guide to immediate utilitarian action but rather serving in its proper capacity as the focal point of annual sacrifice – would have anchored in the here and now the ways in which these important seasonal events were experienced and understood as transactions with worlds and times before and beyond.