Robert Koehl has long considered processions to have played an integral role in Aegean Bronze Age societies. Papers concentrate mainly on evidence from Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland, with additional perspectives from abroad, these geographic divisions forming the basic outline of this volume.

Robert Koehl has long considered processions to have played an integral role in Aegean Bronze Age societies. Therefore, when assembling a volume to honor his retirement from Hunter College, contributing authors were asked to focus attention on this subject. Processions are a unique social phenomenon in that they engage large groups with a singular purpose or outcome, acting as a cohesive force in societies. Yet they are elusive both in Aegean art and texts, which has challenged the participants in this volume to approach the subject from various viewpoints, providing evidence of ritual and ceremonial places, pathways and practices, based on archaeological and, in one instance, textual evidence. Artistic depictions in a variety of media provide a means of identifying settings, participants and the possible roles they play, while specific ritual objects are the subject of some contributions, their context and imagery offering another means of enhancing our picture of processions. Papers concentrate mainly on evidence from Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland, with additional perspectives from abroad, these geographic divisions forming the basic outline of the volume.

This text develops a new perspective on Late Bronze Age (LBA) Ireland by identifying and analysing patterns of ritual practice in the archaeological record. The bookends of this study are the introduction of the bronze slashing sword to Ireland at around 1200 BC and the introduction and proliferation of iron technology beginning around 600 BC.

The exotic and impressive grave goods from burials of the ‘Wessex Culture’ in Early Bronze Age Britain are well known and have inspired influential social and economic hypotheses, invoking the former existence of chiefs, warriors and merchants and high-ranking pastoralists. Alternative theories have sought to explain the how display of such objects was related to religious and ritual activity rather than to economic status, and that groups of artefacts found in certain graves may have belonged to religious specialists. This volume is the result of a major research that aimed to investigate Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age grave goods in relation to their possible use as special dress accessories or as equipment employed within ritual activities and ceremonies. Many items of adornment can be shown to have formed elements of elaborate costumes, probably worn by individuals, both male and female, who held important ritual roles within society. Furthermore, the analysis has shown that various categories of object long interpreted as mundane types of tool were in fact items of bodily adornment or implements used in ritual contexts, or in the special embellishment of the human body. Although never intended to form a complete catalogue of all the relevant artefacts from England the volume provides an extensive, and intensively illustrated, overview of a large proportion of the grave goods from English burial sites.

This is a great work by one of the pioneers of modern archaeology. The period covered is from 1700 to 700 B.C. and is mainly concerned with the author’s field work in western Britain. It deals with burial ritual – dances, processions, "houses of the dead", the objects deposited, the building of the barrow; and it shows by line drawings and photographs how scientific excavation nowadays is planned and executed. The book gathers together an immense amount of research completed over a long span of years on burials and the ceremonial which attended them. Originally published in 1959.

In The Politics of Ritual Change, John Thames explores the intersection of ritual and politics in the zukru festival texts from Emar and suggests a new understanding of the Hittite Empire’s relationship to northern Syria in the 13th century BCE.

This book is the fruit of the third Cotsen Advanced Seminar conducted at UCLA. A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance, students of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and which ways ritual research can go in that discipline. The product is a fairly accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines, backgrounds and agendas, arguing mostly in the most logical fashion, yet with little agreement between them. So this book should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology. It should rather be seen as a reflection of what the discourse in the archaeology of ritual is today. The outcome has been extremely thought provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.