Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2020
This chapter turns to our evidence for ritual practice at the site, in particular activity centred on the three hot springs. Rather than being curative in nature, the water is understood as primarily a medium for enabling ritual relinquishment of objects lost through theft or decay. The chthonic importance of the water is emphasized and linked to other aspects of ritual at the site, in particular reports from the ancient author Solinus that coal was burned on Sulis’s altars. Depositional practice at Aquae Sulis is compared to other watery sites in Britain and Gaul, and the Bath corpus of ‘curse tablets’ is placed into a wider context, with the sanctuary at Uley serving as a particularly important counterpoint to Bath.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.