Abstract
The last 20 years have witnessed a new-found interest in the archaeology of sacred landscapes and ritual performance. Anthropological archaeologists are now increasingly concerned with interpreting meaningful places, an objective often dependent on investigations of the construction, experience, and modification of sacred geographies. Ritual practices, defined heuristically and cross-culturally as highly formalized and symbolically charged acts, have dramatically shaped archaeological landscapes as diverse as households, agricultural fields, and monumental henges. This chapter critically reviews archaeological approaches to religion and landscape arguing that archaeologists have much to offer geographers and others interested in the fundamental spatial mediation of religious experience. More specifically, the contribution examines how ritual performances orchestrated within evocative built environments created charged thirdspaces, a process which engendered a critical consciousness of place and social identity. The presentation of a particular case-study from the Moche culture of Peru (ca. AD 600–800) demonstrates the affective power of ceremonial constructions to create political subjectivities and generate plural social meanings and imaginings. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the thirdspace and heterotopic qualities of archaeological sites in contemporary northern Peru. Scholars have recently investigated the heterotopic aura of ruins as places of alterity associated with decidedly other times and peoples. The analysis draws attention to the continued political efficacy of ancient ruins and to the potential ethical challenges facing archaeologists excavating sacred sites.
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Neo-evolutionary (selectionist) and cultural ecological studies of ceremonial architecture are also still undertaken in the discipline but are not considered here given their general disregard of religious meaning and experience (see Graves and Ladefoged 1995). However, archaeologists adopting historical ecological theories have successfully dispelled the myth that the environment constitutes an objective reality transcending the social context of its production and experience. At the same time, this perspective is equally critical of theories that reduce landscapes to a cultural construction and ignore the agency of anthropogenically transformed places (see Schann 2012).
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Such a perspective resonates with Jones’s notion of “ritual-architectural events… occasions in which specific communities and individuals apprehend specific buildings in specific and invariably diversified ways” (Jones 2000: xiii).
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Swenson, E. (2015). Archaeological Approaches to Sacred Landscapes and Rituals of Place Making. In: Brunn, S. (eds) The Changing World Religion Map. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_24
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