Art and archaeology

Abstract

We start this review in the sanctuaries of archaic and classical Greece. The book Between Deity and Dedicator is the PhD thesis of Sanne Hoffmann. Hoffmann's aim is to examine terracotta votive figurines through their entire lifecycle, following their journey from production to dedication to deposition within the sanctuary (fifteen of which are chosen, with a preponderance, never really fully explained, towards those of female deities). Theories of object agency and an emerging interest in object biographies are extremely well-chosen as the frameworks in which to discuss a set of objects that were surely imagined to have some sort of efficacy in prompting a response from the deity to whom they were dedicated. It is so often the case that introductions lay out long explanations of theories that are then never again mentioned in the rest of the book as the author gets stuck in to the ‘content’. Here, though, the theory is evoked effectively and explicitly at key parts throughout the thesis.