recognized through archaeological excavations’.13 For many peoples the mundane
landscape was, and is, interwoven with sacred sites.14 Grappling with the problems
of using the physical record to study how sacred spaces were defined, and religion
practised, archaeologists of prehistory have thus pointed to the problems raised by
attempts ‘to maintain a distinction between sacred or ritual landscapes, and secular
or mundane landscapes’.15 In Timothy Insoll’s words, ‘the same landscape can
mean different things to different people, and can be one and the same, and thus
lack any arbitrary division’.16 Growing awareness of the problems raised by
accepting a simple dichotomy between secular or everyday sites (farms, homes,
fields) versus sacred ones (ceremonial sites, tombs) has led archaeologists of
religion recently to argue that their work should not be focused solely on publicly
recognized sacred sites, but rather on their overall context.17
This emphasis on the fluidity between boundaries, such as those between the
sacred and secular, is an issue which is equally alive in social anthropology. Sacred
spaces are interpreted as foci for the religious identities of communities, acting as a
‘lens’, focusing ‘attention on the forms, objects and actions’ in it.18 In a study of
how different definitions are attached to two different shrines by the various
religiously different communities of Palestinians living in the West Bank in the
1980s, Glenn Bowman emphasized their fluidity, in particular the porous
boundaries between those sites which are officially acknowledged as sacred, and
those which are not so acknowledged, but nevertheless regarded as ‘secret-sacred’
by both Christian and Moslem communities.19
Scholars from other disciplines have thus considerably refined Eliade’s
paradigm, emphasizing the importance of behaviour in defining sacred space, the