Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe [Paperback]

Richard Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0415345510 | ISBN-13: 978-0415345514 | Edition: New edition

This fascinating study explores how our prehistoric ancestors developed rituals from everyday life and domestic activities. Richard Bradley contends that for much of the prehistoric period, ritual was not a distinct sphere of activity. Rather it was the way in which different features of the domestic world were played out until they took on qualities of theatrical performance.

With extensive illustrated case-studies, this book examines farming, craft production and the occupation of houses, all of which were ritualized in prehistoric Europe. Successive chapters discuss the ways in which ritual has been studied, drawing on a series of examples that range from Greece to Norway and from Romania to Portugal. They consider practices that extend from the Mesolithic period to the Early Middle Ages and discuss the ways in which ritual and domestic life were intertwined.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Professor of Archaeology at Reading University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (May 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415345510
• ISBN-13: 978-0415345514
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,801,783 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars This book goes far beyond discussion of the artifacts themselves to show the minds of the builders., August 30, 2007

By 

invisible (United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ritual and Domestic Life in Prehistoric Europe (Paperback)

I found this text a very good representation of its subject matter. Bradley takes the thesis point, that ritual has been an inseparable component of daily life since the dawn of European culture and explains it fully, using well organized examples supported by 20 pages of references. Doing so he corrects many decades of common archaeological misinterpretation, casting the findings of the past in an intuitive light and making them much more understandable than they would otherwise be.

He illustrates his thesis using observation of artifacts used by surviving traditional cultures, compares them with past artifacts, establishes functional usage and traces the intermediate steps. He takes common human behaviors and artifacts, links them across both geographic distance and time, then extrapolates to make generalizations which hold together much better than many traditional interpretations of fragmentary evidence from the deep past.

All of this is intuitively evident to those few of us who have actually lived on the land and discovered the rhythms of building, planting, tending crops and animals, and harvesting. But most of us live in an ever changing urban world where custom seldom lasts a season and there is no real affective connection with the rituals of daily life. If we see ritual in our own lives is in the form of huge "sporting" and "concert" pageants, weddings, funerals, "The Academy Awards Ceremony" and other staged events. So it is no wonder that for much of the last century anthropologists have made the mistake of assuming that artifacts and folkways either had an utilitarian purpose or a ritual one but not both simultaneously.

I'd recommend this well written and easily digested book as supplemental reading for any undergraduate anthropology, archeology or history major. It should also prove of interest to human systems engineers, architects and behavioral scientists.