The Iberian Peninsula has been a region subject to a constant influx from migrating people and moving objects, whether by land routes from the European continent or by sea routes from the African continent. This characteristic is the basis for me to reflect on the transculturation processes of a specific supraregion, namely the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula. In doing so, I focus on the intraurban places for religious communication with and to deities in four selected port cities that differ greatly from each other. I am interested in the extent to which the processes of religious placemaking and the typology of cities interacted and influenced each other.
In research history, the Roman cities of the Iberian Peninsula as such are very well researched. (Panzram 2017; Olcina Domènech u. a. 2014; Houten 2020) However, the focus tends to be on the power relations deriving from the Roman occupation, as well as on the political and military history under Roman rule. The topic of transconnectivity is addressed, but then either evaluated from an economic perspective or limited to certain chronological periods, such as the pre-Roman development, especially the Phoenician and Punic periods, or the late Roman or medieval periods, especially with a focus on the Arab-Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula.
Recently, literary sources were used to reconstruct diverse social spaces, and labour biographies of migrants were sketched using the epigraphic evidenc. (Keegan et al. 2013; Holleran 2016) Nevertheless, a deep analysis of the diverse urban religioscapes is hardly available. Rather detailed studies on individual gods are evaluated on a supra-regional basis, such as Isis (Alvar Ezquerra – Gasparini 2020, Granizo Candelas 2020) or Minerva in Tarraco (Ruiz-Rodríguez 2017, 323-350). For this colloquium paper I can only present a brief comparison of the diverse religious landscapes in four selected port cities of the East coast by focusing on the placement and design of religious spaces.