Abstract
When looking at prehistory, we see that rituals have long been a human strategy to cope with change and challenges such as death, adversity and trauma. Archaeology reaches beyond a time accessible through oral history and historical documents to explore a trail deep in humanity’s past. This discipline relies on the materiality of human life: artefacts, building remains, pathways, worked landscapes, and monuments. But the archaeological focus goes beyond the physical to capture and trace human activity, sometimes mundane and sometimes grand. From material traces of ritual practices, we reconstruct ritual actions and analyse them to comprehend how particular rituals might have affected the people involved. Underlying the archaeological study of ritual is a concern about how it shapes human understanding, resilience, and engagement in the world, particularly in the face of crises and trauma.
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Nilsson Stutz, L., Stutz, A.J. (2022). Deeply Human. In: Gordon-Lennox, J. (eds) Coping Rituals in Fearful Times. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81534-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81534-9_2
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