We bring together scholars and encourage debate on topics belonging to the large and intricate field of ritual practices in Prehistory and Protohistory, with an emphasis on funerary archaeology and the study of cult places.
The commission deals broadly with archaeological vestiges and processes belonging to the wider Eurasian cultural milieu, but we have been focusing more closely on Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, Greece, and Western Anatolia, as a space of early contacts and interactions for people during the Metal Ages, in the context of emerging state and pre-state formations. Our approaches place archaeology in relation to history, the social and natural sciences.
We have been organizing international meetings and publishing their proceedings since 1993, on topics like tumuli graves, regional and supra-regional cultural contacts expressed in the mortuary domain, social hierarchies, imagery and symbolism in funerary discourse, funerary inventory as status markers, abnormal burials, placing the dead in the confines of settlements, deposits and depositional practices, human and animal sacrifices, relations between settlements, necropoleis and cult places, mountains sanctuaries and so on.
A total of 20 volumes in different languages have already been published, gathering more than 200 authors. These international events were either UISPP Commission meetings, or sections organized inside larger Congresses by Commission members. We are dealing broadly with archaeological vestiges and processes belonging to the wider Eurasian cultural milieu, but we have been focusing in particular on Eastern Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, Greece and Western Anatolia, as a space of early contacts and interactions for people during the Metal Ages, in the context of emerging state and pre-state formations.
Our approaches place archaeology in relation to history, social and natural sciences. We have been also promoting the results of interdisciplinary research in the funerary domain by means of landscape archaeology, remote sensing, geophysical surveys, statistical analyses of funerary data, anthropology and archaeometry studies. This scientific body has also sustained, in the last three decades, by public opinion expression and professional expertise, the joint international archaeological research of several significant funerary sites in Eastern Europe.
We aim also to facilitate the mobility of young scholars, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe and offer them the possibility to take part in field surveys or international events.
