Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities.
It presents a trilectic approach to archaeological study of religious landscapes that combines Indigenous philosophies with the spatial and semiotic thinking of Lefebvre, Peirce, and proponents of assemblage theories. Case studies from ancient Angkor and the Andes reveal how rituals of place-making activated processes of territorialization and semiosis fundamental to the experience of political worlds that shaped power relations in past societies. The perspectives developed in the book permit a reconstruction of how landscapes were variably conceived, perceived, and lived in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre, and how these registers may have aligned or clashed. In the end, the examination of built environments, infrastructures, and rituals staged within specialized buildings demonstrates how archaeologists can better infer past ontologies, cosmologi
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction; Chapter 2: Excavating the Theoretical Landscape: The Archaeological Search for Significance; Chapter 3: Sublime Infrastructures: Emplacing Ritual, Religion, and Power; Chapter 4: Ceremonial Architecture as Semiotic Machines; Chapter 5: Sacred Infrastructures and Rituals of Place Making in the Ancient Andes; Chapter 6: A Tale of Three Temples: The Changing Religious Landscape of the Southern Jequetepeque Valley, Peru; Chapter 7: Karma Ecologies: Khmer Place-Making, Infrastructures, and Ideologies of Space; Chapter 8: the Āśrama and Hospital Foundations of Ancient Angkor; Chapter 9: Conclusion: Landscapes of History; Index.
