In dealing with archaeological materials, some fundamental differences distinguish the study of religion from other archaeological sub-disciplines, such as subsistence, trade or social structures.
Observations on religion involve far more interpretation of the sources than any of the other types of enquiry (Hawkes 1954).
As a first step we must address the question of which prehistoric sources can serve for the study of religion.
Small clay figures of humans and animals could, for example, play a role; but they may also have been merely mundane children’s toys (Winiger 1981). The ultimate scientific explanation favouring the one or the other view has not yet been produced. The next step is to explain just what kind of religious representation is involved (Petrasch 2002). This is easy enough in the case of classical Greece, where the spectrum of religious images ranged from cult images in temples through funerary monuments (kouroi), sculptured pillars (hermai), and bronze and marble statues of gods, which could be displayed virtually anywhere in public or private places, including coins where Zeus’s head was depicted. Another interpretive step is the attempt to classify the motif of the religious representation and to identify the meaning for the original user. In this fashion, European Neolithic clay figurines have been viewed as images of gods, ancestors, priests or praying individuals, or as substitutes for human sacrifices (Ucko 1968; Hockmann 2000-2001; Hansen 2007: 319-45). Attempts have also occasionally been made to identify the particular deity depicted by any given type of statue (Gimbutas 1989).For cultures which have not left any written records, it is evident that the probability of reaching certainty diminishes with each interpretive step. For those periods which are not far removed from the first written records - the Iron Age and within limits even the final part of the Bronze Age - attempts are made to reconstruct the particular regional religious tradition, aiming at projecting or prolonging the situation known from the written sources further into the past (e.g. Maier 2001), based on the ethno-archaeological “direct historical approach” (Fewkes 1893). However, for the Neolithic, this methodology is extremely dubious, given the very great temporal gap separating the Neolithic from the age of written sources. It follows that archaeological criticism of approaches describing a history of the Neolithic pantheon have been correspondingly harsh (Renfrew 1991).
These observations suggest that it is not very meaningful to enquire about the religious meaning of concrete symbols or acts in the Neolithic. Instead, we will examine the fundamental meaning of religion in the European Neolithic. The figurines will serve as the archaeological material to be examined, since these have been widely interpreted as being religious representations - generally, cult images - by prehistorians.