Burning Bulls, Broken Bones: Sacrificial Ritual in the Context of Palace Period Minoan Religion (BAR International)

This monograph aims to shed light on just one facet of the comparatively understudied field of Minoan religion - that of animal sacrifice. As such it is a detailed disucussion and analysis of faunal remains, and takes issue with much of the methodology of what has gone before it. Robert Cromarty points out that other ritual practices such as libations and votive offerings have a far wider distribution and that faunal remains occur only at a limited number of specific sites. Indeed he goes as far, given the nature of the sites, as to question whether the remains are evidence of sacrifice at all in the classical thusia sense, preferring the term 'commensal meat ritual'.

Robert James Cromarty