“Where Are the Hundreds? Museum Display, Fragmentation, and the Hidden Magnitude of Goddess Cults“
Panel: Gatekeeping/Safekeeping Material Culture
2026 Online Symposium, May 3 2026
Reimagining Goddess Scholarship: At the Edges of Sacred Knowledge
Dr. Carla Ionescu is an ancient historian, writer, and educator specializing in Greek religion, material culture, and goddess worship, with a particular focus on Artemis and her cults across the Mediterranean world. She is the founder of the Artemis Mapping Project, an ongoing research initiative documenting sanctuaries, votive deposits, and ritual landscapes associated with Artemis through fieldwork, photography, and digital mapping.
Carla has over a decade of experience teaching ancient history and religious studies at Canadian universities and colleges, alongside a robust public-facing scholarship practice that bridges academic research and wider audiences. Her work frequently examines how modern interpretive frameworks, museum practices, and visual economies shape what survives, what is displayed, and what is forgotten in the study of ancient religion.
She is the author of She Who Hunts: Artemis, the Goddess Who Changed the Worldand She Who Endures: The Cult and Iconography of Artemis of Ephesus. Her current research explores scale, fragmentation, and absence in goddess material culture, with particular attention to how excavation data and museum display diverge. Through lectures, publications, and digital projects, she advocates for approaches that foreground accumulation, loss, and material excess as central to understanding ancient religious experience.
Abstract: “Where Are the Hundreds? Museum Display, Fragmentation, and the Hidden Magnitude of Goddess Cults”
Modern museum displays shape how ancient religions are understood, not only through what they exhibit, but through what they withhold. In the case of goddess cults, particularly those associated with Artemis and related divine figures, the gap between archaeological reality and public presentation is often vast. Excavation reports regularly describe sanctuaries yielding hundreds, sometimes thousands, of votive objects, figurines, statues, and fragments. Yet museum visitors are typically shown only a carefully selected handful. This paper argues that this curatorial narrowing actively gatekeeps material culture by suppressing scale, repetition, and accumulation, which were central to ancient religious experience.
Drawing on case studies from Artemis sanctuaries, including Temple of Artemis Epikritia and the Temple of Artemis at Corfu, this presentation examines how the reduction of hundreds of offerings to a small, aestheticized selection alters interpretation. At Epikritia, excavation reports note the recovery of over five hundred statues and fragments, yet only a few examples circulate in publications or exhibitions. At Corfu, hundreds of votives dedicated to Artemis were uncovered, while modern museum displays present a curated dozen, often detached from their original density and ritual context. The result is a flattened narrative in which goddess worship appears limited, decorative, or marginal, rather than sustained, communal, and materially overwhelming.
The paper contrasts these practices with more recent curatorial approaches, particularly at Museum of the Royal Tombs of Aigai, where scale, fragmentation, and multiplicity are foregrounded rather than concealed. Through reconstructed tomb assemblages, visible storage logic, and the presentation of shards alongside complete objects, the Vergina museum offers visitors a rare encounter with abundance and loss as interpretive tools. This model demonstrates how museums can resist gatekeeping by making absence, damage, and repetition legible rather than invisible.
By focusing on what is not shown, this paper reframes material culture as a site of interpretive control. The suppression of quantity, fragmentation, and redundancy disproportionately affects goddess cults, where meaning was produced through accumulation rather than singular masterpieces. Re-centering magnitude allows us to better understand ancient religious practice and challenges long-standing assumptions about the visibility, importance, and material presence of female divinities in the ancient world.
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