num_pages: 308
description: This volume explores the role of religion and ritual in the origin of settled life in the Middle East focusing on the repetitive construction of houses or cult buildings in the same place. Prominent archaeologists anthropologists and scholars of religion working at several of the regions most important sitessuch as atalhyk Gbekli Tepe Krtik Tepe and Akl Hykcontend that religious factors significantly affected the timing and stability of settled economic structures. Contributors argue that the long-term social relationships characteristic of delayed-return agricultural systems must be based on historical ties to place and to ancestors. They define different forms of history-making including nondiscursive routinized practices as well as commemorative memorialization. They consider the timing in the Neolithic of an emerging concern with history-making in place in relation to the adoption of farming and settled life in regional sequences. They explore whether such correlations indicate the causal processes in which history-making ritual practices agricultural intensification population increase and social competition all played a role. Religion History and Place in the Origin of Settled Life takes a major step forward in understanding the adoption of farming and a settled way of life in the Middle East by foregrounding the roles of history-making and religious ritual. This work is relevant to students and scholars of Near Eastern archaeology as well as those interested in the origins of agriculture and social complexity or the social role of religion in the past. Kurt W. Alt Mark R. Anspach Marion Benz Lee Clare Anna Belfer-Cohen Morris Cohen Oliver Dietrich Gne Duru Yilmaz S. Erdal Nigel Goring-Morris Ian Hodder Rosemary A. Joyce Nicola Lercari Wendy Matthews Jens Notroff Vecihi zkaya Feridun S. ahin F. Leron Shults Devrim Snmez Christina Tsoraki Wesley Wildman
language: English
title: Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Life
publisher: University Press of Colorado