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Religious beliefs between Romans and Illyrians: Cognitive approach to reinterpretation of religious sculpture in Roman Dalmatia

When discussing cultural encounters in the ancient Mediterranean one cannot escape the theme of the encounters between Roman and indigenous civilizations in provinces, where many questions remain to be answered despite the numerous pages dedicated to the process of "Romanization". The uneven availability of material, as well as theoretical inconsistencies – from atheoretical approaches to contradicting theories - have hindered the study of provinces. Ian Hodder summarizes the two main theoretical approaches of the big eighties discussion on archaeological theory as one that offers scientific rigour, but neglects things that make us human, and the other that concentrates on the questions of culture and meaning, but offers no firm scientific methodology. (Hodder (1992), Theory and Practice in Archaeology, p. 147). The middle way may be found in the cognitive approach: things that make us human are not invisible touches of the magic wand, but material and objective processes open to research ; cognitive processes that evolved in Homo sapiens, with laws that are same and valid for ancient as well as modern minds. In studying religion, as one of main points of interest in the frame of cultural encounters, two laws are extremely important. The first one states that the human brain is not capable to handle complex ideas in linear, every-day cognition, and thus makes use of external depositories that can even make part of the cognitive process per se. The second one claims that the choice of the available stimuli from the surroundings depends on cognitive schemata that are partly inborn, and partly formed, mostly in the early childhood. The first law allows us to conceptualize religion as a complex system formed from a multitude of concepts in individual minds, and external depositors common to smaller or larger groups: prayers, texts, rituals and visual material. While it is not in our power to directly observe ancient minds, and for the Roman Dalmatia we don't even have written descriptions of rituals, what we do have is a large corpus of religious sculpture that was directly part of the system. So not only can we use the information gained from the study of sculpture instead of textual sources where those are not available, but we can use it as a complementary source that can offer us answers to questions not even posed in written texts. The second law tells us that not only are cognitive schemata created because of great number of cultural facts, but the production and communication of ideas is directly dependent on created schemata: in that way we can gain insight in concrete beliefs of ancient people through those elements communicated through the image. In my doctoral research I tried to reinterpret in this way religious sculpture of the Roman province of Dalmatia, offering some new answers about beliefs of the inhabitants of Dalmatia, but I also wanted to offer a theoretical model that could provide some new approaches in interpretation of visual material of Antiquity.

Roman Religion; Cognitive Theory; Romanization

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