Sacred places, territorial economy and cultural identity in northern Epirus (Chaonia)

The only sacred place in Chaonia whose material, spatial, and cultic features are sufficiently known is the Sanctuary of Asklepios in Butrint. However, only its middle-to-late Hellenistic and Roman stages have been extensively investigated, focusing on the role of the Asklepieion as a political and self-identity point of reference for the koinon of the Prasaiboi first, and then on the modifications of the complex from the foundation of the Augustan colony onwards. The origins of the cult and the earliest stages of the sanctuary, instead, are much more uncertain. Their traditional dating to the late 4th or early 3rd century BC relied mostly on the alleged chronology of the ceramics found by L. M. Ugolini, in 1929, in a votive deposit and to the role of Corcyra in the transmission of the cult during the late Classical early Hellenistic period. If this latter relationship is certainly plausible, the paper focuses instead on this deposit, in order to give the most accurate dating of its earliest phase and try to understand its link to the origin of the worship. The new dating to the 2nd century B.C. and no more to the early Hellenistic period (late 4th-3rd century B.C.), then provide new food for thoughts on the earliest phases of both the cult and the sanctuary. The main contribute of the paper is then to have definitely isolated these materials from the assumed dating of the early phase of the sanctuary. This dating is based on the dedicatory inscription of the theatre (dated by P.Cabanes between 232 and 168 B.C.) and to the assumption that, for its irregular arrangement, the theatre would be later to the sacellum. In the absence of stratigraphic data, the idea of an early Hellenistic phase of the sacellum has traditionally been linked to the supposed contemporary chronology of the votive deposit as well has to the role of Corcyra. These new data then show that the reading of the sanctuary and in particular its early phases are more complex and certainly need further investigations. Moreover, these materials have not only been study by a chronological point of view, but their reassessment as lead to important considerations about their role in the specific worship of Asklepios, as well as about the impact of the presence of the sanctuary in the regional material culture, stressing the differences between objects from this sacred context and those for other urban regional contexts, suggesting the well known phenomenon of a production dedicated to the sanctuaries.