The Archaeology of Ritual

This book is the fruit of the third Cotsen Advanced Seminar conducted at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance and of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and on possible directions for ritual research in the discipline. The product is an accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines and backgrounds putting forward well-thought arguments, yet with little agreement between them. So this work should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology: it should rather be viewed as a reflection of the discourse in the archaeology of ritual today. The outcome is a collection of papers that is thought provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.