Toward a Methodology for Identifying Ritual in the Archaeological Record: A Case Study from the Southern Levant

Ritual cannot be studied in a vacuum. It is a process that differentiates and gains meaning in its role within its broader social system. This article addresses a major methodological issue in the archaeology of ritual, that there is no consensus on how to interpret ritual in past cultures. This study develops a methodology for identifying ritual in the archaeological record, one that is broadly applicable to archaeological contexts in different regions and combines theoretical approaches to ritualization with methods from household archaeology. To understand ritual’s function within a social system, it must be contextualized against the entire repertoire of a group’s activities. Thus, spatial analyses of all finds throughout different spaces must be conducted in order to reconstruct the range of past human behaviors in different types of spaces. This approach creates a well-founded platform for investigating use variability among ritual and nonritual spaces, and how ritual differentiates itself from other actions. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the Middle and Late Bronze Age southern Levant. The findings shed new light on our understanding of religion in the region, including the primacy of large-scale consumption in public ritual contexts. Contrasting contemporary houses and palaces, little on-site storage and food preparation is detected in ritual settings. The social, anthropological, and religious implications of the divergences identified between ritual and nonritual action and contexts are far-reaching, including the discovery of a hitherto undetected religious ethos and bringing into question whether southern Levantine temples were considered houses of gods.