Fire in Archaeology

This volume publishes a collection of papers inspired by the sessions on "The Archaeology of Fire" held at the 6th and 7th European Association of Archaeologists Conferences in Lisbon and Esslington in 2000 and 2001. In archaeological literature the number of studies on fire is minimal. In archaeological research fire seems to have been the forgotten phenomenon, all attention being focussed on material culture. The 15 papers here (covering the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age and regions from Scandinavia to Italy, Spain to the Black Sea) reflect on the approaches to the study of fire, as an essential phenomenon in human evolution. Included are studies of anthracology, ethnoarchaeology, field archaeology, symbolism, technology and experimental archaeology, whose ideas converge to some universals, such as the relationship of fire with environment, materials, human body, its quality of transformability, and its anthropological centrality.