Over fifty years after the publication of Arnold van Gennep’s (1909) Les Rites de passage, anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) adapted and expanded upon van Gennep’s theory of transition, formulating the now ubiquitous concept of ‘liminality’. From education to performance studies, geography to psychology, there are few disciplines which have yet to embrace the ‘liminal’ in interpretative discussion, defined by Turner as a precarious, interstructural position in social dynamics, frequently associated with pollution and taboo. Another fifty years since Turner’s development of the concept, this paper argues that the popularity of liminality in archaeology has led to its interpretative depreciation, now so far removed from its theoretical origins that it has become an unhelpful synonym for all that is unfamiliar or anomalous, rather than the transitory process of becoming Turner proposed. Through the discussion of the Prepalatial tombs of Crete, it is illustrated that the uncritical invocation of the ‘liminal’ hinders the investigation of other interpretative lines of inquiry: questions of marginality, exceptionality, and the impact of our own unfamiliarity with bodily decomposition on our perception of the past. By highlighting the continued influence of the liminal – despite contradictory archaeological data – on our understanding of prehistoric practices and beliefs, it is argued that liminality cannot continue to be accepted either as a universally applicable concept or convenient metaphor, but must instead be recognised and critically evaluated as a fundamentally theoretical model.

Arnold van Gennep (1909) Les Rites de pass 出版五十多年后, 人类学家维克多·特纳 (Victor Turner, 1967) 改编并扩展了 van Gennep 的过渡理论，形成了现在无处不在的“界限”概念。从教育到表演研究，从地理学到心理学，很少有学科在解释性讨论中还没有接受“阈限”，特纳将其定义为社会动态中不稳定的、跨结构的位置，经常与污染和禁忌联系在一起。特纳提出这个概念的另一个五十年，这篇论文认为，阈限性在考古学中的流行导致了它的解释性贬值，现在已经远离它的理论起源，它已经成为所有不熟悉或异常的无用同义词，而不是成为的短暂过程特纳提议。通过对克里特岛前宫殿墓葬的讨论，说明了对“阈限”的不加批判的援引阻碍了对其他解释性探究路线的调查：边缘性、例外性以及我们自己对身体分解的不熟悉对我们的影响对过去的看法。通过强调阈值的持续影响——尽管考古数据存在矛盾——对我们对史前实践和信仰的理解，有人认为，阈值不能继续被接受为普遍适用的概念或方便的隐喻，而是必须被承认和批判被评估为一个基本的理论模型。