The topic of the 15th International Aegean Conference has been inspired by one of Vienna's most prominent residents: Sigmund Freud. In Aegean prehistory, questions of ritual behaviour and underlying 'metaphysical' beliefs have become a widespread and multifaceted field of research based on a large variety of methodological approaches. At the METAPHYSIS conference a large range of issues of ritual, myth and symbolism in the Aegean Bronze Age were addressed, such as ritual places and ritual landscapes, sacral and sepulchral rituals, social and political ceremonies, ritual acts and performances, the supernatural realm, liminality, irrationality and magic, mythology, hybrid creatures, heroes/heroines, divinities, symbols, emblems and iconography, images of power, and cosmology. Thus, METAPHYSIS was dedicated to the complex relationship between humans and 'the other' - the broad scholarly interface between a popular ritual belief and the cult of deities, i.e. religion in its proper sense.
