Journal of Urban Archaeology

This paper defines place-making as a process in which individuals and communities create lived spaces through what I call ‘thickening’ — a time-tempered process of relating to landscapes and constantly making and remaking places through embodied experience. Focusing on the Hittite Empire, I first explore the temple district in Hattusa as an example of a thin place that failed to engage with an audience beyond a limited set of elites, ultimately resulting in ruination and alteration. On the other hand, the border city of Emar exemplifies thick places created through continuous acts of place-making by the entire community. Emar’s places survived the Hittite intervention in the city, and acted as means of resistance to imperial rule.

The present paper aims to discuss the role of temples and sanctuaries in the formation — both physical and ideological — of the (Phoenician) city. In pursuit of this objective, three case studies will be considered: the temples of Melqart in Tyre and in Cadiz, on which the classical literary sources offer some food for thought, and the tophet, which is undoubtedly one of the most debated (typology of) cult places of the Phoenician (western) culture. These examples will provide an opportunity to reflect on some of the dynamics that drove the place-making process in the configuration of certain urban spaces.

In the wake of Alexander the Great, city founding across the Greek world surged, coinciding with a sharp rise in festival culture, with cities profiling themselves through their main gods. These were often old deities with a regional attraction and established sacred landscapes of their own that had become the new face of the city, even though their sanctuaries were at a distance from the urban nucleus. Using place-making as a lens, this paper examines strategies used by a number of rising cities to appropriate nearby older places of cult and their communities. Both global patterns and local variations of ritual practice and their material expressions become apparent, allowing us to better identify the different means and levels of agencies involved in the transformation of these sacred centres into major urban shrines.

This paper is the first comprehensive Mediterranean-wide analysis of urban Greek and Roman wine and oil production sites. By using diverse examples from a range of periods we reassess the ‘place’ of urban viniculture and oleiculture against traditional explanations of ‘ruralization’, insecurity in the countryside, and urban contraction. New insight into how people engaged with urban spaces is developed through a combination of macro-level analysis in tandem with an observation of experiences at the meso- and micro-levels, by individuals and their neighbourhoods. Set within the context of recent sensory studies, we also explore both the experience of wine and oil production — one of labour, performance, celebration, and interactivity (between people, objects, practices, and place) — and the networks and relationships between production loci and their surroundings. Results highlight that urban wine and oil production was widespread, deeply embedded in the fabric of towns and cities, at times even prioritized, and fundamentally influenced space and the perception of place on variable microregional levels. These activities permeated the lived experience of urban inhabitants and visitors through sight, smell, and sound, and had the potential to restructure and revolutionize how ‘place’ was made.

The assumption that graves were located outside the city or the so-called pomerium disperses when taking a closer look at the urban complexity as well as the dynamic fluidity of territorial and sacred boundaries. The study of urban deathscapes, analysed with the integrative research approach of Religious Ancient Placemaking, unfolds that due to urban growth and the accompanying diversification and densification, lived realities, which are crucial for the formation and dynamics of religions (Albrecht and others 2018; Gasparini and others 2020), differed greatly from archaic jurisprudence. However, the consequence of a growing and diversifying city required greater social cohesion among groups in order to form themselves and claim their place in the urban context. Three selected case studies from Rome demonstrate that professional life was a significant factor in group formation, binding the group in this world and also beyond death, blurring the urban boundary between the living and the dead.

This essay takes its inspiration from the actions of local government in San Jose, Costa Rica, in the 1970s, which used the subterfuge of renovation to curtail or relocate activities it deemed illegal or unsavoury in the Plaza de la Cultura. Archaeological and literary evidence from diverse periods in Antiquity are consistent with the possibility that in the last century of the Republic and the Augustan age (c. 133 bc–ad 14), authorities in Rome weaponized the disruptive processes of construction and reconstruction to make and remake the city’s greatest political stage, the Roman Forum and its immediate environs, according to their ideals, by inconveniencing or even denying access to political opponents or the populace at large.

Focusing on the case studies of the Fountain of Anna Perenna and the Grove of Furrina in Rome, I explore how these once state-sanctioned, religious sites became associated with ‘magical’ practices and chthonic mystery cult rites in the fourth century ad. Rather than representing a break with traditional Roman religion, evidence of place-making activities at these sites demonstrates a continuity of religious memory. The liminal character of spring waters, which flowed above and below the earth’s surface, contributed to the ancient Roman narratives that characterized certain springs as gateways to the underworld. This ascription of liminality to sacred springs, in turn, created appropriate sites for local inhabitants to perform binding rituals within the urban landscape and transformed city springs into sacred places where the living communicated with infernal deities.

The places where passers-by, visitors, and inhabitants of public and private spaces encountered parietal inscriptions exist not only in space but in time. In other words, when a marking is produced (a particular point in time) and consumed (across many moments in time) is just as important a factor in forming a view about the meaning and impact of the graffiti and dipinti found at Pompeii as where the markings are located. By examining places where and when markings were made, this chapter will explore the ways in which places resonate suggestively with the locations in and on which graffiti are distributed and the extent to which graffiti and dipinti mediated the quotidian interactions of children and adults inhabiting Pompeii’s epigraphic and urban landscape.