ABSTRACT
This book is intended to redress a historical neglect of ritual within archaeology, a lacuna attributed to epistemological issues encountered when identifying and theorising ritual and religion in material contexts and an overdependence on ethnographic and literary sources employed to do so. Operating under a definition of ritual as a repeated and mimetic behaviour, contributors to this trend argue that ritual practice is more likely to leave traces and can therefore be examined as a discrete material process.
The volume is a contribution toward the archaeology of ritual in South Asian contexts. It comprises a collection of individual case studies, whose foci geographically span the length and breadth of the subcontinent and temporally the period from the early Common Era until the present day. Whilst the chapters treat ritual within a range of different contexts, each share in the collective purpose of challenging theoretical and methodological forms of its documentation. They do so under three section headings—power, presence and space—each of which serves as conceptual lens through which ritual may be critically examined. This chapter, the Introduction, outlines specific course of development the archaeology of ritual underwent in the context of South Asia.
