First published in 2005. This study results from an intensive years fieldwork completed in Bahrain in 2001. This comprised two seasons of both excavations and surveys (February-May and September-November), separated by the Bahraini summer when it was deemed too hot to work effectively in the field.

The archaeology of religion is a much neglected area, yet religious sites and artefacts constitute a major area of archaeological evidence. Timothy Insoll presents an introductory statement on the archaeology of religion, examining what archaeology can tell us about religion, the problems of defining and theorizing religion in archaeology, and the methodology, or how to 'do', the archaeology of religion. This volume assesses religion and ritual through a range of examples from around the w...

Archaeology and World Religion is an important new work, being the first to examine these two vast topics together. The volume explores the relationship between, and the contribution archaeology can make to the study of 'World Religions'.The contributors consider a number of questions:* can religious (sacred) texts be treated as historical documents, or do they merit special treatment?* Does archaeology with its emphasis on material culture dispel notions of t...

Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African–descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the ...

The Archaeology of Identities brings together seventeen seminal articles from this exciting new discipline in one indispensable volume for the first time. Editor Timothy Insoll expertly selects a cross-section of contributions by leading authorities to form a comprehensive and balanced representation of approaches and interests. Issues covered include:gender and sexualityethnicity, nationalism and casteageideologydisability.

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 th...

Figurines dating from prehistory have been found across the world but have never before been considered globally. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first book to offer a comparative survey of this kind, bringing together approaches from across the landscape of contemporary research into a definitive resource in the field. The volume is comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, with dedicated and fully illustrated chapters covering figurines from the Americas,...