Rock-Cut Monuments at Macedonian Philippi – Taking Image Analysis to the Religioscape

Abstract

The massive amount of rock-cut monuments along the slopes of the acropolis hill of Philippi in ancient Macedon has received scholarly attention since the first expeditions and following excavation and research campaigns conducted by the French School at Athens in the nineteenth century. The documentation of these peculiar monuments, comprising images in relief, etchings, inscriptions, and empty niches, consists of very few early drawings, photographs of single objects and sometimes of clusters of neighboring monuments, maps documenting the monuments’ location along the slopes of the acropolis rock (intra and extra muros) and brief descriptions leading to an iconographical categorization. Despite a variety of subjects, the depiction of a youthful huntress commonly denominated as Artemis/Diana is predominating. Based on the commonly accepted dating of these reliefs to the Roman era, the rock-cut monuments are generally interpreted as expressions of popular religion that went unregulated by the state; some even consider them as evidence for specifically female ritual practice. As part of the project “Rock-cut reliefs in Philippi: a microregional study on the religion of ancient Macedon,” a first on-site documentation campaign was carried out in March 2023. The presented case study of the rock-cut reliefs from Philippi aims at spatializing the religiously connotated depictions within the city-/landscape as a first step and applying the concept of religioscape. With this approach, it differs in the methodology used so far, namely the iconographical analysis of the objects as a first analytical step. This article at hand presents the method used to establish the first three-dimensional data sets of the reliefs for documenting as well as monitoring their condition and aims to demonstrate the immense value of these 3D models given the dangers natural corrosion and vandalism pose to the archaeological objects. Moreover, embracing the ability to capture the landscape setting in 3D allows us to visualize the three-dimensional embedding of the objects into the urban fabric of the city with its varied terrain profile. This allows for new analytical prospects, such as inter-visibility, reachability, or building economy.