Dr Anna Collar

I'm particularly interested in exploring religion and the natural world in Classical antiquity. I am co-founder of a new research network, Environment and the Sacred, which operates as a series of online dialogues with international scholars to discuss ‘natural’ places and aspects of sacred encounter in the ancient world. Bringing together scholars of diverse time-periods captures different cultural responses to the same landscapes, foster comparative work beyond traditional disciplinary divides and reattach chronologies that enable such divisions. The scholarly network is in its early stages, but we are planning an edited volume for Bloomsbury's Ancient Environments series, and there are tangible impacts aready becoming apparent, with members starting to build projects and conferences from our discussions.

Numen: Natural Places, Religious Experiences and the Politics of the ‘Wild’, is a future project which aims to develop the new sub-discipline of cultural ecology in Classics/Archaeology. Numen will investigate the intense spiritual magnetism of certain natural places (e.g. Mount Lykaion, Corycian Caves, Turkey, Avebury). Collating and analysing material culture, architecture, artefacts, landscapes and texts, we will investigate: 1) diachronic experiences of these locations, 2) natural places as loci of religious, political and emotional expression, and 3) how reverence for/in natural places contributes to reification of 'the wild'. This is an ambitious project which will advance discussion in Classics, offer deeper temporal context for the concept of ‘rewilding’, and reflect on contemporary (western?) separation from 'the wild’.

The diverse mobilities of the contemporary world have brought migration, diaspora and religious placemaking into sharp relief, with the development of new theoretical ways of analysing and understanding them. The rich archaeological and epigraphic material of the Roman world offers huge scope for new interpretation through analyses using these lenses of mobility and placemaking, and in the immediate future I will continue to press this through the development and completion of my current major research project, Mobility and Place. Syrian migrants and the new religions of the Roman world. 

The book is a bottom-up exploration of Syrian migration in the Graeco-Roman world through the framework of religion: examining the evidence for Syrian communities, the beliefs they took with them; and the different ways that these diaspora communities established places and relationships for themselves in new contexts. This discussion is framed by the perspective of the New Mobilities Paradigm to think about mobility and migration in the archaeological record, balanced by theories from sociology of religion and human geography regarding place attachment and ritual in generating social cohesion. Phenomenological landscape analysis offers contextualised accounts of Syrian places of worship and the behaviours were enacted there, through three diverse cultural case studies: the Tyrian trading station at Puteoli, Italy; the military-civilian town of Carnuntum, Austria; and the international slave markets at Delos, Greece. This book will bring a robust theoretical approach to push the study of migration in antiquity to a necessary higher level.