Infrastructures of Religion and Power

<p>This book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities. </p><p>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 cosmologies ideologies of time and place and historically specific political struggles.</p><p>The study will appeal to students and researchers interested in ritual infrastructures landscape archaeological theory political institutions semiotics human geography and the civilizations of the ancient Andes and Angkor. </p>