Inverting vases in Bronze Age Crete: Where? When?Why?

As is well known, there is no scholarly consensus regarding the definition of ritual. As an outcome of the on-going debate between historians of religion, cultural anthropologists and archaeologists, a major distinction has been made between religious and non-religious rituals, both of which include standardized sequences of actions and a well-defined intention and message (Bell 1997: 138-169; Bloch 1989; Kyriakidis 2005: 28-30; 2007; Rappaport 1999: 137). In particular, ritual has long been a major focus for prehistoric archaeologists, who often take advantage of the diverse connotations of this term in the absence of an uncontroversial definition of the diacritics of religion and belief (Insoll 2004: 78- 80). Against this background, rather than attempting to grasp the ‘frame of mind’ that an archaeologically documented ritual entails by drawing on cross-cultural comparisons, it seems more promising to try to highlight ‘what ritual does’ (Bell 2007), that is, to make sense of the patterns of behaviour which the ritual actions involve, by drawing on the evidence represented by the related artefacts, the depositional practices, and wider settings. Yet, ritual artefacts and settings are not always identifiable as a per se category in the archaeological record. Indeed, if one refers to Catherine Bell’s ‘non-definitive traits’ of ritual (namely, repetition, invariance, rule-governance, formalism, air of tradition and symbolism: Bell 1997: 138), it is an inescapable conclusion that most human actions convey various degrees of ritual connotation. In reciting a prayer or a benediction formula at the beginning of a meal, for instance, no special tools or settings are involved that can affect the effectiveness of a ritual action; nor can the meal itself be defined as a religious ritual. A caveat should accordingly be borne in mind, namely, that most ritual actions are deeply embedded into the everyday life of an individual or a community (Bradley 2005: 44- 50, 119-120) and that many of them end up leaving no or minimally visible traces in the archaeological record – all the more so when an individual, domestic, or at any rate non-official ritual is concerned (Kyriakidis 2007: 16-18). Conversely, this very consideration enhances the importance of the contextual interpretation of the archaeological evidence, since it envisages the role that even the humblest of artefacts can play in carrying out a ritual within the context of settings that are occasionally used to that end.