Description

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The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion provides a comprehensive overview by period and region of the relevant archaeological material in relation to theory, methodology, definition, and practice. Although, as the title indicates, the focus is upon archaeological investigations of ritual and religion, by necessity ideas and evidence from other disciplines are also included, among them anthropology, ethnography, religious studies, and history. The Handbook covers a global span-Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and the Americas-and reaches from the earliest prehistory (the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic) to modern times. In addition, chapters focus upon relevant themes, ranging from landscape to death, from taboo to water, from gender to rites of passage, from ritual to fasting and feasting. Written by over sixty specialists, renowned in their respective fields, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will serve both as a comprehensive introduction to its subject and as a stimulus to further research.

About the Author

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Timothy Insoll, University of Exeter, Professor of Archaeology Timothy Insoll is Al-Qasimi Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, he was a Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge from 1995 until 1998, when he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Manchester. After becoming a Reader in 2004 and being awarded a personal chair in 2005 he moved to the University of Exeter in 2016. He is the author or editor of 16 books, three special journal issues, and numerous articles and reviews on a wide range of research topics across the discipline of archaeology, and has completed fieldwork in Mali, Ghana, western India, Bahrain, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda.