use by writers from the patristic period onwards, although they commonly
employed it in its more general sense, to refer to those things which were, and were
not, sacred.6
For Eliade the sacred distinguishes itself from the profane, an act he described
as hierophany, that is the manifestation of the sacred.7
He therefore viewed a
sacred place as one where the three cosmic levels, earth, heaven and the
underworld, at once come into contact with each other, and are represented.8
Whilst he acknowledged that in many religions the entire living world is sacred, he
argued that ‘since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated
with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for
consecrating space’.9
At the same time he acknowledged that religious man
regarded the entire world as ‘the work of the gods’ and therefore sacred.10 For
Eliade hierophany represented the centre of consecrated space, and at the edges of
the sacred lurked chaos, the unknown, which he described as the profane.
Scholars from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and archaeology have
been happy to engage with Marcel Eliade’s paradigm.11 Archaeologists of religion,
especially those who study prehistory, have been preoccupied with the question as
to how one reconstructs the religious practices of societies, including identification
of their sacred sites, when many of the religious practices which signify sacredness
leave little or no physical trace in the archaeological record. For behaviour, as
modern observers have noted, often constitutes an important marker for
recognizing the sacred.12 Building on material from anthropology, it has been
observed that ‘many of the sites and areas regarded as significant by living peoples
are not marked by any human construction or other human activity which would be