The Lavinium Girls as “matrons-to-be”: the commemoration of girls in Middle Republican Italy (✖ Title Page) ✖ In 1977, fragments of what may be 70-100 statues—2/3-3/4 life-sized-- were found in the so- called East Sanctuary (santuario orientale) northeast of the Latin city of Lavinium. i The statues, which are primarily of children, adolescents, and teenagers, male and female, were part of a large deposit of votives, discarded at the end of the 3 rd century BCE. ii The sanctuary as a whole has not been excavated, the deposit has not received a full publication, and few of the statues have been restored. ✖ The examples that you see here, on display at Pratica di Mare, ancient Lavinium, are the most complete and the ones most frequently illustrated. My study, therefore, is based on a very small selection of the material recovered from this deposit. ✖ The deposit also included four large images of an armed goddess, probably Menerva, who is presumed to have been the deity worshipped in the East Sanctuary, and ✖ many statuettes: these include draped males and females, kourotrophic females, a few swaddled babies, and some groups that are thought to depict families. iii The broad character of the deposit suggests that here Menerva watched over matrons, matrimony, and young people, as others have observed. iv There were few anatomical votives so this cult does not appear to have emphasized healing but this function would not apply to the statues in any case. ✖ The production and firing of a large-scale terracotta is too complicated to suppose that these were commissioned at a time of crisis. The statues seem to have had less to do with the domestic sphere of family life than with social competition and the affirmation of family status. I came to this topic through an interest in women’s ritual processions. Reflections of girls as ritual actors are rare but the detailed treatment of the Lavinium girls and their public display provides insights into their role in contemporary society and perhaps to their own roles in ritual. My goal is to characterize the different age groups represented by the girl statues and to try to recover some of the visual associations they would have had for contemporary viewers. First, however, let me make three general observations about the statues as a group: 1) First, as you can see, there are radical differences in scale. Artists often use size to suggest the age of a child and as viewers we typically use size to judge it. Size, however, does not seem to be a reliable criterion for age in this group of statues: ✖ some comparatively small examples (like D 227, on the right) seem, from their dress, to represent girls who are older and perhaps married; ✖ some larger examples (like D 224 and 234, on the left) seem from their dress or facial features