Gunnel Ekroth, in “Why Does Zeus Care about Burnt Thighbones from sheep? Defining the Divine and Structuring the World Through Animal Sacrifice in Ancient Greece,” sets the plate for this volume by reassessing the historical backdrop against which nascent Christian traditions related to animal sacrifice emerge. Animal sacrifice was the central ritual action of ancient Greek religion, as well as in most religions of the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. Although modern scholars have studied this religious practice for more than 100 years, animal sacrifice has always posed something of a problem, as it is so fundamentally alien to western European Christian culture. In order to understand animal sacrifice in the ancient world, one needs to encounter it in its own historical setting. This means not only exploring its role in what moderns more narrowly construe as the religious sphere, but also in social and political orderings as well. Of central importance, to archaeologists of sacrifice like Ekroth, is the practical execution of the rituals. Ekroth introduces readers to a relatively new wealth of material evidence about animal sacrifice in the pre-Christian, Greek world. Ekroth’s critical contribution is to assess the results of recent research on the archaeology of sacrifice. Her main concern is with historical animal sacrifice as it was actually performed, primarily, in the thysia ritual, which occurred across ancient Greek sanctuaries between the 8th and 1st centuries BCE. At these events, mainly domesticated animals along with the fruit of agricultural labor and libations, after being dedicated to a deity, were sacrificed and shared – with butchered portions ostensibly going to gods like Zeus who preferred thighbones, while the rest of the animal, in particular the meat, was given to the human participants. Ekroth encounters in the material handling, treatment, and distribution of meat derived from ritualized animal sacrifice an ancient structuring of the world. Analysis of these sacrificial rituals provides us with windows to the cosmologies, hierarchies of social power, and group identities associated with those who participated.

This bibliographic essay addresses the different approaches to animal sacrifi ce generally with a focus on animal sacrifi ce in ancient Greece specifi cally. As animal sacrifi ce was one of the unfamiliar rituals introduced to western anthropologists by foreign cultures, the ritual of animal sacrifi ce was addressed by anthropologists as early as the nineteenth century. Later, the topic was a trend in other different majors like archaeology, history , sociology and psychology as well.

This bibliographic essay addresses the different approaches to animal sacrifi ce generally with a focus on animal sacrifi ce in ancient Greece specifi cally. As animal sacrifi ce was one of the unfamiliar rituals introduced to western anthropologists by foreign cultures, the ritual of animal sacrifi ce was addressed by anthropologists as early as the nineteenth century. Later, the topic was a trend in other different majors like archaeology, history, sociology and psychology as well.

The archaeological evidence for foodstuffs is an underappreciated topic within the field of Classics. While syntheses and narratives exist for prehistoric periods, this project foregrounds evidence for foodstuffs within an examination of animals and social change in ancient Greece. This study presents primary datasets of animal bones and teeth from three ancient Greek settlements framed in a larger narrative of changing food practices and urbanism in Greece: the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age village at Nichoria, the Archaic town at Azoria, and the urban center of Classical Athens. Classical Greek urbanism is accompanied by significant changes in the mobilization, processing, and distribution of animal resources within communities. While Homeric heroes might have feasted on heroic portions of meat, their Early Iron Age audience did not. By the Archaic period, corporate groups (cultic or civic in nature) provided meat to members in expressions of communal identity through feasting. There is a shift in how animals were processed related to the development of professional butchery. It is possible to trace the development of an urban cuisine – from textual sources, ceramic vessels, and organic remains – a meatier cuisine prepared in new ways within the Greek cityscape. Food production strategies shift from a fairly homogenous set of strategies in the Late Bronze Age to a fairly heterogenous set of strategies in the first millennium B.C. It is perhaps possible to conceive this shift as an adaptation to changing climate around this time, with heterogenous strategies a better fit for various ecological niches. These heterogenous production strategies, wherein different settlements practiced different productive strategies, perhaps contributed to an increase in connectivity in the Mediterranean. A narrative foregrounding animal bones contextualizes our understanding of ancient Greek feasting, butchery, animal husbandry, sacrificial ritual, and refuse disposal within a historical study of social changes.

This paper addresses the animal bone material from ancient Qumran from the perspective of zooarchaeologial material recovered in ancient Greek cult contexts. The paper offers an overview of the importance of animal bones for the understanding of ancient Greek religion and sacrificial practices in particular, followed by an interpretation of the Qumran material taking its starting point in the bone material and the archaeological find contexts, including importance of the presence or absence of an altar at this site. The methodological implications of letting the written sources guide the interpretation of the archaeological material are explored and it is suggested that the Qumran bones are to be interpreted as remains of ritual meals following animal sacrifice while that the presence of also calcined bones supports the proposal that there was once an altar in area L130. Finally the similarities between Israelite and Greek sacrificial practices are touched upon, arguing for advantages of a continued and parallel study of these two sacrificial systems based on the zooarchaeological evidence.