Making place with the divine: Urban ritual practices at regional sanctuaries in the Graeco-Roman world

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 became 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.