Overview

This book's aim is to go beyond the limits of the contemporary scientific paradigm of ""material culture"" by presenting some of the issues confronting archaeology, as it attempts to approach the spirituality of the past.It brings together archaeologists from Western and Eastern Europe, and the USA who, more or less obviously, have used their experientiality to approach the world view and mystic experience of ancient peoples.The book intends to present several arguments in support of an archaeology of spirituality through a series of seven case studies.What method should we use to approach spirituality? Are we still dependent on quantitative methods? Is phenomenology an appropriate instrument? Can experientiality approach a spiritual experience? Is the emic approach efficient enough to approach the spiritual side of a studied phenomenon? Are the analogous ethnographic models suitable instruments for this task? How much of the spirituality of the past is still accessible today? Could we build artificial contexts that would allow the recreation of the phenomenological condition analogous to the originals?Archaeology Experiences Spirituality? goes beyond the archaeological study of material culture, offering a fascinating lecture for the reader of the twenty-first century.

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9781443833684

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Reviews

The anthology is a contributuion to experimental archaeology, and invites the contributors and readers to a debate subsumed in the title: Archaeology Experiences Spirituality? The cultivation of a sense of the natural world amongst North America Native tribes is condensed in Algonquin concept of Manitou. His richly exemplified and illustrated article leaves the reader in a fertile limbo between the archaeological subject matter, and an ethnography of participation. Gheorghiu's experimental approach to archaeology comes close to art thoery (theoretical in its rethinking the past, artistic in its involvment of the body and senses in thinking). His position versus the careful separation betwen what can be known through empirical methods and the theoretical elaboration of hypotheses, defines a scale. Dr Theodor Barth, Social Anthropology Oslo National Academy of the Arts, in 'Norwegian Archaeological Review, iFirst, 2012, pp. 1-3.

Author Information

Professor Dragos Gheorghiu is an anthropologist and experimental archeologist whose studies focus on the process of cognition and material culture, of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies of South Eastern Europe. His most recent research is concerned with the reconstruction at large scale of prehistoric contexts and their analysis. He is the author, editor and co-editor of multiple books on archaic technologies and semiotics of material culture, and has a sustained publication activity on prehistoric Europe.

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