Book Review: The Archaeology of Ritual. Cotsen Advanced Seminars, 3

Bryn Mawr Classical Review

I've included this review in spite of the fact that it doesn't mention Egypt, because the general topic is relevant and might be of interest to those who are looking at ancient Egyptian religion and ritual and would like to see some general perspectives on how to tackle the subject. Here's a short extract:

Evangelos Kyriakidis (ed.), The Archaeology of Ritual. Cotsen Advanced Seminars, 3. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2007.
Reviewed by Sandra Blakely, Emory University

This collection of essays from the 2004 Cotsen seminar represents a solid contribution to the genre of edited conference volumes on archaeology and ritual.1 Among these, it stands out for the range of disciplines assembled. Archaeologists often approach ritual primarily within the context of regional, cultural or period studies. The result has been an uneven development of theory and methodology vis-à-vis the material evidence for ritual practice and belief. These developments characteristically appropriate much from cultural anthropology, religious studies and sociology. They run the risk of relying on the outmoded, classic models of these disciplines, while at the same time not taking advantage of current debates within the field, which represent the development of those concepts through application and testing over multiple scholarly generations. This volume represents one of the most effective counters to this tendency, since it presents contributions from cognitive science, philosophy, religious studies, anthropology and art history as well as archaeology. The contributions offer the unmediated voices of the disciplines on which archeology has drawn, and demonstrate the difficulty as well as the potential for interdisciplinary discussion. The authors vary in the extent to which they directly address archaeological concerns, or their optimism for meaningful contributions to those problems. Strong disagreements on the value of definitions and the relationship between ritual and religion, run throughout the papers, as does a persistent concern for the usefulness of ethnography and ethnohistory in studies of ancient societies. The collection is a significant contribution: the papers are of consistently high quality, several offering article-length synopses of books within their field; regional specializations include Mesoamerica, the Aegean, Inner Mongolia, and Zimbabwe. Consensus is neither its goal nor its outcome. The collection will stimulate meaningful debate, and belongs in the collection of scholars working in both archaeology and religion. It would be an excellent inclusion in graduate seminars in both fields.

The volume consists of 10 essays, framed by an introduction and conclusion by the editor and an additional response by C. Bell.

See the above page for the complete review, plus a link to the Table of Contents.