Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology offers a new understanding of the materiality of religion. By drawing on the field of archaeological theory and method, the relationship between religion and material culture is explored. It is argued that the material elements of religious life have been largely neglected by the discipline of religious studies, while at the same time religion has been traditionally seen as problematic for archaeologists. Why do we not talk of the discipline of the archaeology of religion, in the same way we do the anthropology of religion, or the sociology of religion? The volume considers the historical problems of approaching the material elements of religious life and bridges the methodological gap between religious studies and archaeology by proposing a new way of understanding the materiality of religion – as active, engaged and projecting a level of autonomous social agency. Finally, the critical examination of archaeological approaches to the materiality of religion is furthered through the consideration of non-archaeological ways of examining the social roles that material culture plays in human life.

Charts a new understanding of the materiality of religion, by drawing on the field of archaeological theory and method.

This is a collection of twenty-one papers deriving from talks given at conferences of the European Association of Archaeologists in 1997 and 1998. The papers discuss specific issues and case studies involving questions of "cult" and religion in the pre- and protohistory of southeast Europe and the Mediterranean, looking at sites in Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moravia, Italy and Greece, southern Russia and Iberia, amongst others. The papers have been divided into three thematic sections: Symbols of the Other World: Representation and Imagery; Sacred or Profane: Conceptions of Cult Places; and Life and Death: Interpreting Mortuary Practice. As the editors note, studying prehistoric religion is an ambiguous procedure, necessarily mixing the practices of archaeology, anthropology, religious studies and psychology. Yet they anticipate the creation of a generally accepted theoretical framework for the archaeology of cult and religion, a method for reconstructing past belief systems from the contextual evidence of material culture, thus dragging the archaeology of religion back into the academic mainstream. The diverse range of methodological practices represented by these papers clearly highlight the difficulties involved in realising this objective.

Studies on everyday life commonly focus on housing conditions, eating and drinking, clothing, hygiene and medical care, professions, land and sea communications, and generally, on production and consumption. Material objects are dominant in these areas; nevertheless, mental aspects can also frequently be considered the carrier and/or symbol of concepts or values. For this reason, an international symposium held in Cambridge in 2001, which counted the Viennese Institute of Byzantine Studies among its organizers, was intent upon including the concept of "well-being" in its multi-facetted aspects, in the material, legal and philosophical-religious dialogue. The symposium's proceedings, consisting of twenty-three contributions preceded by an introduction discussing the current state of research and future plans, accordingly deal with, among other things, town planning, perfume in the secular sphere as well as that of the church, magical practices and holy physicians, clothing as a status symbol, and forms of abundance and shortage in the Byzantine diet.

Study of the Khanty pastoralists of Siberia and their use of sacred landscapes.

No problem so vexes learning as how to balance the claims of the written record of humanity against the actualities of man's material detritus. Religious Texts and Material Contexts brings together scholars of the written record and those of the material realm beyond, especially those working in the academic study of religion. This book examines the relationship between archaeology and text-scholarship through religion featuring cases of archaeology supported and not supported by written evidence.

These eighteen papers (plus introduction)were given at 'The Cambridge Conference on Archaeology and World Religion: The Examples of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism', held at Cambridge, 14-16th April 1998. The papers deal with a diverse range of subjects, although they are all based on archaeological research and/or results.