Animal sacrificial rituals in pre-Roman Southern Italy: Dog sacrifices in Vaste.

The paper focuses on the results of the archaeological research carried out by the University of Salento in Vaste (Southern Apulia). In the very centre of this ancient settlement, a holy place was set up between the 4th and 3rd centuries BC: three cavities contained the remains of rituals involving the sacrifice of domestic animals with subsequent slaughter, cooking, and collective banquets. Even five dogs were sacrificed, although they were neither slaughtered nor consumed. Ancient authors report that bloody dog rituals were associated with the different aspects of religious behaviour based on the particular value attributed to this animal; this value was often ambiguous, since the dog was associated with many gods and considered impure and unclean. It is possible to identify the use of this rite in several contexts of the Italian peninsula between the Iron Age and Romanization, in which similar acts were clearly distinguished in the stratigraphy and interpreted as “abandonment” or “closing rituals”: the remains of the dogs lay above the layers of votive deposits or in contact with the destruction and abandonment layers. An analysis of the ritual and an explanation of its diffusion, together with an exegesis of the literary sources, can be framed in a research perspective that includes the anthropology of the ritual. It emerges that human alimentary behaviours, even prohibitions in the case of dogs, provide a key to understanding the ritual attitude towards animals; these behaviours are inscribed in the relationship of perpetual tension between the feelings of affinity and distinction, between human society and animal species.