Shifting Baselines of the British Hare Goddess(es?)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Studies of past religions tend to fall into one of two camps: tightly-focused empirical examinations of a particular religious culture, or wide-ranging phenomenological studies divorced from any local context. Little scholarship engages with the middle ground of longue durée development in particular phenomena within the same geographic region or ecological niche. This interdisciplinary paper seeks to prove the value of just such an approach by examining the worship of female beings that negotiated the relationships between humans, animals, and their shared environment. Employing archaeological and textual evidence, it studies three female beings associated with hares in the British Isles: an anonymous Romano-British figure, the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre – whose name shares an etymological root with "Easter" and its lagomorph attendants – and the medieval Welsh St. Melangell. It proposes that these figures display different semantic centres but nonetheless show remarkable continuity in their secondary characteristics. This is used to argue that the temporally-local concerns of each society found expression in "the same" figure of the British Hare Goddess, whose origins and "meaning" is today frequently discussed on online internet fora – perhaps reflecting the Digital Age’s own anxieties regarding the flow and reliability of information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• HumAnE Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24576