Full Course Description

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Scholars in numerous disciplines have drawn upon the material remains of past societies as a constant source of information for the workings of the sacred in social life. Within archaeology this continual interest in religious life has contributed not only to important theoretical innovations and interdisciplinary collaborations but also to the perception, at least, of the field’s current disciplinary fragmentation. While there has been increasing debate about the methods, theories and goals of an archaeology of religion as a broadly comparative project, there has been a continuous stream of temporally specific and regionally constrained studies of particular religious traditions, ritual practices and symbolic systems. This course provides an intensive exploration of archaeology’s engagement with the question of religion in both pre-historic and historic contexts. We will explore the ways in which the discipline has adopted and transformed various theoretical paradigms for analyzing how religious life was established through the materiality of social practice and eventually preserved in the archaeological record. In particular this course will examine such themes as the materialization and aesthetics of ritual practice, the nature of social control in religious contexts, the integration of texts and artifacts, the production and experience of sacred space, the politics of archaeology in current debates about religion, and the structure of archaeological argumentation, its limits and potentials.

COURSE DESIGN:

This seminar was conceived in roughly two equal halves. The first six weeks offer a broad overview of how archaeology has negotiated its disciplinary niche both theoretically and in terms of its data in the largely social scientific study of religion. On the one hand this has necessitated reflection on the definitional questions about the categories of religion, ritual, and ideology and their analytical relationships. On the other hand archaeology has struggled with the partial nature of its data set as evidence of religious life and what are the conceptual links between the material record and structures of belief. The readings for these weeks are drawn from varied traditions, time periods and regions. They should serve as a means for reflecting on the importance of a comparative project for the archaeology of religion.

The second half of the course (weeks 7-14) takes up a series of case studies that are geographically located within a broadly defined Mediterranean regional focus. The goal here is not to provide a history of religion in this region from the Mesolithic to modernity. The aim, instead, is to highlight archaeology’s specific contributions, namely its temporal depth and range, as well as the particularities of its scope and research questions. These studies should also serve as sounding boards for many of the theoretical and thematic issues developed in the first half of the course. These case studies are provisional. They can (and likely will) be changed with the interests of the students in the class.

Throughout the course we must remain aware of a potential danger that comes from the exclusive attention to religion in archaeology that emerges in both the readings and course design. That danger is that we loose sight of the very embeddedness of religion, however defined, in the operation of the social worlds of past societies. We must remain aware of how we impose a sense of the secular and the profane onto the past by drawing on the particular experiences of a post-Enlightenment modernity.

PREREQUISITES:

This course is a graduate level seminar that assumes that students have some background in archaeological debates and social theory. We will not spend significant amounts of time reviewing the various theories of religion that have dominated the social sciences. Students are encouraged to use the following works as useful references:

Morris, B. (1987). Anthropological studies of religion : an introductory text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pals, D. L. and D. L. Pals (2006). Eight theories of religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Students who are interested in additional background readings in the anthropology of religion or archaeological theory and method are encouraged to see me in office hours.

This course is open to advanced undergraduates (Juniors and Seniors) with the consent of the instructor. Those who are interested should meet with me during the first two weeks of the semester.