Unmasking the Sacred: an alternative approach to the archaeology of religion (ENGLISH TRANSLATION) (original) (raw)

Today, ‘the sacred’ is one of the most widely-used terms in archaeological discussions of religion. However, although the word ‘sacred’ is an adjective, it often appears as ‘The Sacred’, and in this way, is found masquerading as a noun. I use this grammatical distinction to demonstrate how the notion of sacrality is currently flawed, but nonetheless, can be transformed into a useful cross-cultural, and therefore archaeological term if rehabilitated. My argument rests on the idea that ‘the sacred’ can be more usefully viewed as: the quality of being set aside, marked off, or forbidden, rather than some holy essence of spiritual power. This revised meaning is well suited to archaeology because features like boundaries, walls, ditches and other forms of physical barriers/borders are visible in the material record. Although it is a simple idea, it is also a powerful one because social relations are both represented by and reproduced in spatial relations (Moore 1996: ix). That is, acts of defining a space using exclusion and inclusion are also strategies of social construction. I use the example of Thracian tumuli to show that by applying a sociological notion of sacrality to understanding them, it can be suggested that the main purpose of these sites may not have been to house the dead, but they were rather a generic form of marking off an area or feature as sacred, that is, set-apart or forbidden. Thus, this paper suggests how a re-modelled idea of sacrality can throw new light on the significance of ritual sites.