This book Explores Indo-European fire rituals and sacrifices throughout history and fire in its fundamental role in rites and religious practices. Analyzes fire rituals as the unifying structure in time and space in Indo-European cultures from the Bronze Age onwards. Asks the question how and why was fire the ultimate power in culture and cosmology? Has a broad interdisciplinary audience including archaeology, ethnography, folklore, religious and Indo-European studies.

This book Explores Indo-European fire rituals and sacrifices throughout history and fire in its fundamental role in rites and religious practices. Analyzes fire rituals as the unifying structure in time and space in Indo-European cultures from the Bronze Age onwards. Asks the question how and why was fire the ultimate power in culture and cosmology? Has a broad interdisciplinary audience including archaeology, ethnography, folklore, religious and Indo-European studies.

This book presents papers from a conference that was held in Beijing on 26-27 September 2005, in collaboration between the Swedish National Heritage Board (NHB) and the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The conference marked a fresh start for archaeological collaboration between Sweden and China. There is a long tradition of cooperation between China and Sweden in the field of archaeology and both the conference itself and the present publication are further developments in this cooperation. This book is an overview of the work done by each country and institution in the field of archaeology and neighbouring disciplines. The papers describe archaeological projects and problems, such as urbanization processes and 'Neolithization', and the special sciences pursued in respective institutions: palaeobotany, osteology, archaeometallurgy, conservation, and digital survey methods.