Worldviews in Contact: Gendered Symbolic Systems and Votive Offerings in the Roman Northwest

Abstract

The Roman colonial project was critically intertwined with gender. Not only did men and women experience the impacts of colonialism differently, but with respect to imperial ideology the Roman worldview set up a gendered binary in which masculine, civilized Rome was obligated to control and care for an uncivilized, feminine other. I analyze gendered experiences under colonialism as well as the impact of this Roman gendered worldview through analysis of votive offerings from sanctuaries across Roman Britain and northern Gaul. As symbolically loaded objects chosen by individual men and women, offerings provide a unique perspective on these issues. My dataset, compiled from published sources and museum records, contains about 2,500 individual offerings and several thousand coins from five sanctuaries in Britain and five in Gaul. Rather than isolating specific offering types, I approach the dataset as a series of diverse assemblages, utilizing multivariate statistical techniques to identify patterns. My approach highlights the analytical challenges inherent in studying gendered offerings, most notably that prioritizing certainty with respect to the objects chosen for inclusion—prioritizing those objects most securely gendered and those most clearly offered rather than lost—would lead to an unsupportable underestimation of women’s level of participation in offering ritual. Analysis confirms that individual offering decisions reflect not only religious belief but also broader societal dynamics: the impacts of Roman colonial control are visible even in these personal religious decisions. An overall similarity in gendered proportions of offerings between Britain and Gaul suggests the power of the Empire to influence gendered participation across provincial borders. I argue that greater heterogeneity in objects offered at rural sanctuaries—and more women’s participation—relates to the status of cities as centers of Roman colonial administration. Moreover, the range of offerings chosen by both men and women speaks to socioeconomic diversity of offerers as well as the complex intersection of gender, economic status, and expressed ethnicity in this colonial environment. Finally, a symbolic approach to the offerings reveals the uptake of a Roman gendered worldview among those who left them, seen in the reifications of gendered binaries including public/domestic, civilized/wild, and impermeable/permeable. This study provides a valuable perspective on gendered behavior in this colonial context, but it also highlights the real impacts of a colonial project that was gendered at its core. By centering the role of this binary gendered worldview, I seek to refocus scholarship on identity and culture change in the Roman provinces: contingency, fluidity, and complexity in colonial culture and identity must be respected, but in doing so we cannot lose sight of the power of binaries in the lives of real people.