A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World presents a comprehensive overview of a wide range of topics and archaeological materials relating to the practices, expressions, and interactions of religion in antiquity. Chapters are primarily focused on “lived religion”—religious experience rather than belief—in the Greco–Roman world, and take their point of departure in concepts, aspect, and empirical material relating to central themes within the archaeology of religion. Featuring 35 contributions from leading specialists, researchers, and theorists in a variety of relevant fields, chapters are structured around themes that include archaeology of ritual, embodiment, experiences, creating spaces of experiences, designing and appropriating sacred space, sharing public space, expressiveness, and agents and transformations. Collectively, chapters serve to shape our understanding of the role of objects in cultural practices of constructing religion and encountering and appropriating such a religion as objectified representations of the sacred. Combining the best current scholarship with a wide–ranging geographical scope and chronological span, A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World offers illuminating insights into everyday religious life and ritual practice during antiquity.

Rubina Raja is Professor of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She has published widely on religious identities in the eastern Roman provinces, and is editor of the series Contextualising the Sacred , Lived Ancient Religion , and Palmyrenske Studier . She is the author of the monograph Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces, 50 BC – AD 250: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa. She is currently working on a monograph on the religious life of the Tetrapolis region. Jörg Rüpke is Professor of History of Religion at the University of Erfurt, Germany and director of the ERC Research Group “Lived Ancient Religion.” His books include Domi militiae (1990); Rituals in Ink (2004); Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (2006); (ed.) A Companion to Roman Religion (Wiley–Blackwell, 2007); Religion of the Romans (2007); Fasti sacerdotum (2008); The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History, and the Fasti (Wiley–Blackwell, 2011); Von Jupiter zu Christus (2011); Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change (2012); Religiöse Erinnerungskulturen (2012); The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (2013); Ancients and Moderns: Religion (2014).