ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with some of the stickiest controversies involving archaeology, because they touch upon people's faith. Controversies have raged for three centuries over whether archaeology can contribute to our understanding of religion. Mainstream religions' conventional images of their deity may dismay a seeker, such as a woman who feels alienated by picturing a wrathful masculine god. Devotion to the Virgin Mary could fulfill a Catholic's longing for a sympathetic divine figure. Another myth about "primitive peoples" is that all small societies, Palaeolithic or contemporary non-Western, have "shamans" leading "shamanic religions". An astute British anthropologist commented that academics' search for "universal laws" of human behavior is "ersatz religion", a foolish faith. Archaeological research has also been called upon to illuminate mainstream Western religions. Archaeology has a habit of uncovering discomfiting data. The archaeology shows an interesting farming town whose people decorated their clean-swept homes with handsome paintings and heads of wild bulls sporting sweeping horns that their menfolkprobably, menfolkhunted.
