The principal aim of this dictionary is to provide readers with a reference tool for the terms, techniques and major sites in archaeology, but it is also intended to reflect the constant state of flux in the discipline. This is a difficult balancing act in a concise volume. Presenting archaeology as a process rather than as a body of knowledge implies that particular sites, cultures, methodologies and conceptual models must also be described in a way that is in some sense ‘provisional’ and open to change.

A basic element in all religions is the awareness, both intellectual and emotional, of man’s dependence on non-human powers: powers which we conceive as personal, and vis-a-vis which we normally stand in a reciprocal relationship. Gods and demons are the forms taken by these powers, their hypostatizations, as it were, in the shape of light and darkness, sun and moon, fire and water, bird and snake. The divine can reveal itself in all the phenomena of nature, just as the demonic can.