The ancient site of Nessana in the south-western Negev had an important role in the logistics of early-Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The arid climate, which preserved organic material, and the richness of multilingual epigraphic evidence from this region make Nessana a key site for archaeological study of the material culture of pilgrimage.

At the crossroads of scholarship scrutinizing digital religion and pilgrimage, this article analyzes the use of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram by devotees of Our Lady of Juquila, a Marian image in Oaxaca, Mexico. It combines the close reading of content and descriptive online ethnography with web scraping and data analysis. The article sketches these platforms’ role in pious expression, virtual community building, pilgrimage group communication, and devotional marketing, tracking closely the intertwining of religion and commerce, particularly religious tourism promotion. The data reveal that Facebook serves as the most popular platform for Juquila’s devotees, thanks to its open, pro-sharing design and flexibility regarding group formation. As a result, it has become the essential hub of devotee expression. YouTube, thanks to its particular affordances, has become an ideal niche for narrating travel to Juquila’s shrine and a showcase of the networked nature of devotion as users borrow tools, tropes, and expressive techniques from many sources, religious and secular. Instagram is the least popular platform among devotees because its design is less open and amenable to group communication. It does, however, facilitate both smaller, more intimate community formation, as well as shallow but significant community building on popular public pages run by religious tourism promoters hosting attractive, easily sharable, free stockpiles of images, memes, and devotional slogans. In the end, social media use appears to be stoking pilgrimage in Mexico and setting the stage for significant cultural change in the future as new tools, emerging shared devotional aesthetics, and media logics reshape religious expression and devotee communication. It is also becoming an unparalleled historical archive of popular religious culture.

This paper explores the intersections of religion, heritage, and politics in divided societies by focusing on two events that occurred in Cyprus before the crossing points opened (2003). These are the Greek and Turkish Cypriot reciprocal pilgrimages to a Christian and Muslim site, respectively, and the two sites' restoration. I argue that in these events the Cyprus Issue effected the transformation of pilgrimage practices and sites into matters of political agreement, implicating them in processes of conflict management and resolution. In this context, pilgrimage facilitated inter-communal exchanges and intra-communal frictions and antagonisms that question binary oppositions through which questions of conflict and amity have been debated in pilgrimage studies.

Recent research has considered the relationship between Stonehenge and sites in south-west Wales, raising questions about whether the first monument at Stonehenge copied the form of an earlier stone circle at Waun Mawn and how the relationship between these sites was connected with the transport of bluestones between the different regions. But Stonehenge and Waun Mawn are not the only prehistoric sites in Britain and Ireland that share architectural elements and hint at social connections across vast distances of land and sea. This debate article explains how the questions raised about these Late Neolithic monuments can and should be applied to other monumental complexes to explore this insular phenomenon.

On Rameshvaram island in the south-east corner of India lies one of Hinduism's most important temples—the Rāmanāthasvāmi, one of the four dhams (‘holy abodes’) and the site of two Śiva-liṅgas said to have been consecrated by Rāma himself. A temple has existed here since at least the eleventh century, although most of the present temple dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the island was protected by the Setupati rulers of nearby Ramnad. In several of the long corridors and halls for which this temple is famous are brightly painted life-sized standing images of over 100 male figures attached to columns. Though such images are characteristic of many south Indian temples from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there are far more at Rameshvaram than at any other south Indian temple. This article examines the number, location, and significance of these numerous standing images within this temple. By exploring the significance of the temple as a long-standing site for the royal performance of devotion, this article seeks to address whether the great number and identity of the life-sized donor images can be explained by both Purāṇic ideas of kingship and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch observations of the pan-Indian status of the temple.

Occupation of Mitzpe Shivta in the Negev Desert coincided with times of economic and social upheaval and counterculture movements during the sixth and seventh centuries AD. Inscriptions and symbols found in rock-hewn rooms in the region indicate that while the agricultural economy declined during the late Byzantine period, pilgrimage and monasticism prospered.

This article analyses the cross-carrying pilgrimages to Vézelay and Walsingham, staged between 1946 and 1948. These were aimed at achieving peace, penance, and reconciliation at a time when communism was on the rise, there were fears that war would return, and the nuclear threat was real. Encompassing several contingents (or Stations), these religious post-war Catholic pilgrimages stand in contrast to the ‘secular’ pilgrimages to battlefields and cemeteries after 1918. Yet they retained a strong military element because of the substantial involvement of veterans, and their organisation, leadership and articulation. This article argues that the pilgrimages gave veteran pilgrims a chance to continue their service in the form of direct spiritual action, utilising their wartime experiences in the context of pilgrimage in order to conduct these physically challenging journeys. It will also explore the wider aims of atoning for wartime actions, and the ways in which the pilgrims were received by the communities they passed through. Whilst ultimately unsustainable due to their novelty and complexity, they laid a foundation for military-penitential pilgrimages, provided an outlet for spiritual and worldly concerns, and presented Catholics (especially in Britain) in a positive light in the years immediately after the Second World War.

Anthropologists have demonstrated that having information about new settlements is crucial for drawing migrants. Pilgrimage to ritual landscapes and their shrines allows people, including Maya societies, to explore places where they can settle. They then establish or augment settlements around the landscape shrines, which explains the locations and growth of some centers. Migrants continue to make pilgrimages to shrines, such as sacred mountains, near their receiving settlements to enhance community cohesion through ritual contact with spiritual forces. In this article, I show that pilgrimage is an important element in the establishment of select migrant settlements and their community identity. I focus on Maya and Mesoamerican cultures, particularly at Mensabak in Chiapas, Mexico, and on supporting archaeological, historical, and ethnographic information. I conclude that Maya perceptions of movement, connectivity, and transformation in their world are linked to pilgrimage, migration, and community formation. Importantly, pilgrimage provides a religious variable, in addition to better-known economic, political, or demographic factors, to consider in migration.