Research
Sacrifices Among the Ancient Greeks: Communion with the Divine
This article explores the role of sacrificial rituals in ancient Greek religious practices, emphasizing their function as a means of establishing and maintaining communion between mortals and the divine. Sacrifices were integral to both individual and collective life, marking key transitions such as birth, initiation, warfare, and civic celebrations. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining literary, iconographic, and archaeological sources, this study examines the typologies of offerings, the material and symbolic significance of altars as the focal point of ritual activity, and the complex interplay between sacrificial practices and sociopolitical structures. Particular attention is given to the ideological and performative dimensions of blood sacrifices, as well as to the debated phenomenon of human sacrifice. By analyzing a broad spectrum of evidence, this article contributes to a nuanced understanding of how ritualized violence functioned as a mechanism of religious expression, social cohesion, and power negotiation in the ancient Greek world.
Insularity in a Religious Context in the Sanctuaries of Western Thrace
The region of Thrace in the Aegean is an example of the dynamics of contact between Greeks and local populations. The region was chosen because of the need to understand the social, cultural, and religious dynamics in the hybrid sanctuaries sphere in the Northern Aegean through material culture. We will present preliminary reflections on the issue of insularity in cult contexts in the formation of a regional and/or local koiné in the Northern Aegean of the Archaic period, in the sphere of the Northern Aegean peraÃai. The socalled "glocalism", immersed in contact networks, creates a bond of isolation and non-isolation between the islands and mainland. For this proposal, will be present specifically the sanctuaries of hybrid deities founded by Greek Thassos Island.
Uses of Money in the Early Days of Colonial Brazil: The Coins and their Stories
What history of colonial period Brazil can coins, medals, and decorations tell? Could it tell us more than Official History has offered? What memory can we preserve or rescue? Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in his book Claro Enigma, when referring to memory, tells us that finished things, much more than beautiful, yes, of course, must remain.1 As Drummond's poem suggests, coins preserve memories, purposes, rescues homelands, physical places, mental places. This small but powerful object that has existed for over two thousand and five hundred years2 emanates power, disseminates intentions, reveals cultures, and identities. These same identities and cultural history that, decoded in the choices of the signs of power (Chartier, 1990: 220), reveal themselves in monetary iconography. For that matter, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp3 explains that cultural memories need spaces and places to happen, not only physically but also rituals, festivals, commemorative dates, images, and texts. And all these places, all these cultural manifestations, somehow, are displayed in coins, they are in the coins. Jacques Le Goff (2003) also believes that memory is a crucial element of what is understood by identity, whether individual or collective, and the search for identity is one of the essential activities of individuals and society itself.
