Timothy Insoll

Corisande Fenwick

Bethany Walker

Born from the fields of Islamic art and architectural history, the archaeological study of the Islamic societies is a relatively young discipline. With its roots in the colonial periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its rapid development since the 1980s warrants a reevaluation of where the field stands today. This Handbook represents for the first time a survey of Islamic archaeology on a global scale, describing its disciplinary development and offering candid critiques of the state of the field today in the Central Islamic Lands, the Islamic West, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The international contributors to the volume address such themes as the timing and process of Islamization, the problems of periodization and regionalism in material culture, cities and countryside, cultural hybridity, cultural and religious diversity, natural resource management, international trade in the later historical periods, and migration. Critical assessments of the ways in which archaeologists today engage with Islamic cultural heritage and local communities closes the volume, highlighting the ethical issues related to studying living cultures and religions. Richly illustrated, with extensive citations, it is the reference work on the debates that drive the field today.

The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Archaeology

The Proceedings of the Cambridge Conference

Case Studies in Archaeology and World Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first text to offer a comparative survey of figurines from across the globe, bringing together myriad contemporary research approaches to provide invaluable insights into their function, context, meaning, and use, as well as past thinking on the human body, gender, and identity.

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines

This collection of twelve papers, the proceedings of a conference on archaeology and religion held in Manchester in 2002, aims to bring together these two fields which have had an unhappy relationship in the past. `Ritual' is the last resort when the archaeological evidence resists interpretation, perhaps because, as Timothy Insoll argues, archaeologists view the world through secular eyes. The contributions examine a range of sites, from different periods and cultures, in order to suggest new ways of assessing the material evidence. Religion, after all, might have been the primary factor in shaping past societies. Subjects include: the archaeology of Norse religion; the archaeology of the Mesaran Tholos tombs; cult places in Minoan Crete; the Neolithic `Sweet Track' of Somerset; neurophenomenology; the archaeology of Ethiopian monasticism; smelting iron in Ethiopia; India's `Temple City'; the modern history of Sanchi, a site of Buddhist monuments; royal funerals and sacrifices in Nepal; Christianity and conversion in south-west Britain.

The Proceedings of the 2002 Manchester Conference on Archaeology and Religion

Belief in the Past

How people engaged with materials such as clay or stone, why people dug features such as pits, why they decorated their bodies, or treated their dead in certain ways, were all meaningful in the African past. However, these are subjects that have been generally neglected by archaeologists working in Africa until recently. Material Explorations in African Archaeology examines materiality in African archaeology by exploring concepts of material agency and material engagement and entanglement in relation to their manifest presence in persons, animals, objects, substances, and contexts. It investigates the magnificent and complex world of past African materiality by considering a range of case studies. These include, for example, why standing stones were erected, the potential meanings of bodily alteration practices such as scarification and dental modification, and why, recurrently, Africans in the past gave ritual importance to objects, materials, and locations thought of as exotic or different. Adopting a multidisciplinary focus, the volume draws not only on archaeology but also, among other areas, ethnography and history, discussing themes such as bodies, landscape, healing and medicine, and divination, as well as concepts such as memory and biography, transformation, and metaphor and metonym.

Material Explorations in African Archaeology

Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology Timothy Insoll

This book re-examines the definitions of 'religion' and 'ritual' through a range of archaeological examples drawn from around the world and across time. It serves as an introduction to the theory and methodology of the archaeology of religion.

Archaeology, Ritual, Religion

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.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion

Salman Almahari

Rachel MacLean

In, The Islamic Funerary Inscriptions of Bahrain, an illustrated catalogue of 150 gravestones with modern Arabic transcription and English translation is provided with discussion of gravestone chronology, types, manufacture, decoration, iconography, inscription content, archaeological context, history of research, and contemporary significance and conservation issues.

The Islamic Funerary Inscriptions of Bahrain, Pre-1317 AH/1900 AD

These eighteen papers (plus introduction)were given at 'The Cambridge Conference on Archaeology and World Religion: The Examples of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism', held at Cambridge, 14-16th April 1998. The papers deal with a diverse range of subjects, although they are all based on archaeological research and/or results. The papers deal with subjects of: sacred space, theoretical issues, iconography, aspects of a religious whole and the development and understanding of world religions.

A comprehensive overview, by period and region, of the archaeology of ritual and religion. The coverage is global, and extends from the earliest prehistory to modern times. Written by over sixty renowned specialists, the Handbook presents the very best in current scholarship, and will also stimulate further research.

Timothy Insoll

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