5A Life Less Ordinary A Life Less Ordinary: the Ritualization of the Domestic Sphere in Later Prehistoric Europe

a language that is dying too. That is how words have gained their ascendancy over the ideas they impart. One of those words is ‘ritual’. The use of this term has a special importance in the history of archaeology, and also in the ways in which the subject is practised now. Ritual has been treated as a particular kind of communication, a way of acting out fundamental propositions about the world. It occupies a specialized arena in which the sacred penetrates the mundane. From this perspec-tive, ritual is often equated with the expression of religious belief and is marked by a high degree of formality (Turner 1969; Bloch 1989; Rappaport 1999). It is performed using prescribed movements, ges-tures and utterances and is often conducted throug