Inside the volcano and into the trees.

Pilgrimage, mobile behaviours and the creation of religious place in early Roman Latium 1

“…27 Excavation also revealed a series of additional structures, dating between the late second century BCE and the second century CE, on the terrace above the temple precinct, including a late Republican nymphaeum. 28 The terrace also revealed evidence for a hoard of middle Bronze Age axes, to the east of which were found late Bronze Age ceramics and carbonised materials that appear to have demarcated an area intentionally left free of structures, which the excavators suggest was perhaps memorialised as the site of the original lucus. 29 Immediately to the south of the proposed lucus there once stood a small square structure which, Giuseppina Ghini and Francesca Diosono propose, might have protected the sacred tree, the removal of a branch from which gave a runaway slave the right to challenge the rex Nemorensis.…”