Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T04:53:12.234Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Connecting Fragments: a Sensorial Approach to the Materialization of Religious Beliefs in Rural Mesopotamia at the Beginning of the Second Millennium BC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2011

Nicola Laneri
Affiliation:
Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, Via Ulisse Aldrovandi, 16 00197 Rome, Italy, Email: nicolalaneri@hotmail.com

Abstract

The materialization of religious beliefs is a complex process involving an active dialectic between ideas and practices that are physically engraved in the artefactual remains of ritual activities. However, this process is relevant only if it is based on a contextual association of elements (e.g. the performance of ceremonial activities, the creation of symbolic objects, the construction of ceremonial spaces) that validates the meaning of each component as part of a whole. Thus, archaeologists should try to connect these elements to form a network of meanings that stimulated the senses of ancient individuals in framing their cognitive perception of the divine. The study here presented will thus tackle such general theoretical tenets focusing particularly on the importance of the materialization of religious beliefs in constructing the ideological and economic domain of small-scale societies in rural contexts. In so doing, these topics will be confronted and developed through the analysis and interpretation of the archaeological data obtained from the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000-1600 BC) architectural complex at the northern Mesopotamian site of Hirbemerdon Tepe, located along the upper Tigris river valley region in modern southeastern Turkey.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)