Anthony Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> DougWeller Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> > >
> >
> > Assuming that they shared our view on
> religion and
> > the division between the religious and the
> secular
> > is certainly ethnocentric.
> >
> >
>
>
> Assuming they didn't is flawed methodology.
>
> I'm not making any assumptions, Doug. I'm asking
> that neither "side" engage in projection,
> assumption or ethnocentrism, that's all.

Your original post didn't even entertain the idea that our early ancestors might not have made such a division. Until you start recognising that this is a real possibility, indeed the most likely scenario, you're being ethnocentric.

This of course doesn't excuse archaeologists from lazily labelling things as religious artefacts.
I wrote this a while ago and probably would write it slightly differently now, perhaps bringing in the question of whether the development of agriculture, etc. brought about a shift in worldview from one in which our ancestors saw themselves as part of the natural world to one in which our ancestors saw themselves as manipulators of it and somehow outside it, as we do today.



Bryan Fagan (Fagan 1991:441) quotes as anonymous author as saying "Religion is the last resort of troubled excavators." Binford is reported to have said "You can't excavate a religion." Both quotes illustrate the existence of a problem for archaeologists wishing to look at ancient religious beliefs.

Archaeologists frequently identify art, artefacts and structures which they believe to have been associated with religion. Some of the earliest of these are the so-called Venus figurines found on palaeolithic sites in Europe, painted stone plaques in southern Africa, rock shelter art in Australia, and the famous cave paintings of Spain, France, etc, all of which have been considered to have been evidence of religious activity, most if not all of which have been the subject of some controversy. Most noteworthy of these controversies has been the arguments over the ‘Mother Goddess' and the Venus figurines, exemplified by the writings of Marija Gimbutas. Female figurines (male, androgynous etc figurines being ignored} were interpreted as proof that early humans worshipped a universal female deity until invading Indo-Europeans brought with them male gods. In some of Gimbutas' writings "every figure that is not phallic - and some that clearly are - are taken as symbols of the Goddess. This includes parallel lines, lozenges, zigzags, spirals, double axes, butterflies, pigs and pillars." (Meskell 1995). More recently many other interpretations have been put forward, eg that they were territorial markers, teaching devices, magical tools, identification tokens, teaching devices, primitive contracts, objects used in birthing rituals, and so on. (Maskell 1995). Some archaeologists have argued that certain ‘female' figures may not be female and even that some have been looked at upside down and are actually male phalluses (Bisson and White, 1997).

Clearly there is a serious problem here. One important aspect of the problem is the problematic nature of religion itself. Renfrew (Renfrew 1994:47) warns against the danger of assuming that we know what religion is, suggesting the importance of anthropological studies of non-urban and non-literate cultures. But more than that, he warns that the standard assumption that religion is "a distinguishable, and in some senses separable, field of human activity" is itself a problem if we wish to understand the culture and thoughts of ancient peoples. In particular, if religious sites or objects are ‘embedded' in a culture, that is if they are also used for secular uses or functions, identification of their functions as religious elements of material culture can be particularly difficult.

For Renfrew (Renfrew 1994) religion concerns that which transcends nature and includes an individual religious experience. This is, as he says, a uniformitarian assumption that a central feature of religion today, the personal religious experience, existed in past religions. He also attempts to identify several other aspects of past religions that could be identified in the archaeological record. One of these, as mentioned also in his book with Bahn (Renfrew and Bahn 1996), is iconographic representation of recurrent themes such as passage after death of some essential element of a human being. Another is the existence of formalised actions -- ritual -- and special places and times.

Renfrew and Bahn (1996:388) also use the term ‘cult' when looking at the archaeology of religion, and refer to the "archaeology of cult, defined as the system of patterned actions in response to religious beliefs". They have developed 16 archaeological indicators of ritual based on earlier work by Renfrew (Renfrew and Bahn 1996:391-392).

Martin Carver gives a slightly more cynical definition of cult, defining it as "something strange that other people do, and its strangeness is owed mainly to observations by strangers." Although he endorses Renfrew's 16 indicators, he also points out that they stem from analogies to aspects of western religions, and thus can be used only to identify cult "which is organised, publicly enacted and socially supported" (Carver 1993:vi). Not surprisingly for an introduction to a book of essays on cult, he argues that to scientifically study the archaeology of religion will require "many more case-histories and brave essays from which the subject can generate its own dialectic, its own relativity theory."

How can we recognise supernatural powers? Renfrew and Bahn point out that iconography is a key way of recognising distinctive powers which are worshipped or served in some fashion. This would normally be one in which "individual deities are distinguished, each with a special characteristic, such as corn with the corn god, the sun with the sun goddess." Another slant on what we have learned from careful study of prehistoric art believed to be evidence of religious practice is the evidence (Lewis-Williams 1998) that some was the result of altered states of consciousness (with various possible causes including hallucinogens, sensory deprivation, migraine, etc). Studies of Upper Paleolithic art suggests that it involved such altered states of consciousness and some concept of animal power, ie some form of shamanism.. But as Lewis- Williams points out, although we may have discovered the origin of certain types of art this does not reveal the meaning it held for the artists and viewers. It's worth noting that this finding is based on the use of analogy, always an important tool for archaeologists (in this case the source of the analogy is neuropsychological research).

This is, of course, an exceptional case. Most of what we can say about ancient religion depends upon analogy with what we know about religion either from texts or from ethnoarchaeology. The existence of shamanism today and writings about shamanism in the past, for instance, are often used in explaining prehistoric religion.

Philip Rahtz laments the difficulties archaeology has in deducing the nature of early religious belief, and invites us to imagine we are Martian archaeologists (see his essay ‘The Martian Expedition to Wharram Percy.', Fahtz 1985). However, he also offers an example (Rahtz 1985 which demonstrates the importance of analogy with known religions.

This is the discovery of a 6th century pit at Rahtz's excavation of Cadbury-Congresbury. The pit was filled with 80 assorted objects which appeared to be bits and pieces of virtually everything found at the site, with weathered bits of skull beneath the pit's rock lining. Fortuitously they were able to compare it with a modern site in County Donegal, Ireland. There they found a holy well which was still being visited by Christians, with "an astonishing collection of objects - bits of clothing, combs, biros, a plastic magnifying glass, two religious tracts on holy water and happiness wrapped in paper bags, a collection of pre- decimal...coins in a purse; a hair-slides, and some more obviously Christian objects such as crosses..." with more of the same nearby plus "bottles of all kinds from shampoo to detergent." All had been associated with visitors who had come hoping to be cured or who had been cured. As Rahtz says, they could now cite an ethnoarchaeological parallel to suggest (not prove) that their 6th century pit was also a religious collection. If it was a religious site as suggested, the particular religion involved and the significance of the site will probably never be known.

Another basic assumption is that religion involves activities that take place in particular locations. Generally these are structures erected for the purpose (but see the growth of ‘house' Christianity in recent decades and consider the problems this will cause for future archaeologists!). Massive religious structures requiring considerable communal effort are assumed to reflect the socio-political structure of a society and the place of religion in that structure.

Recent geophysical work at Catalhoyuk has shown that the entire settlement consists of "myriad small, mud-brick dwellings." In other words, no public architecture, in particular no temple, no place of worship large enough to hold a large number of people, or of any different status to the rest of the buildings. A decentralised social structure with little division of labour is assumed (Balter 1998:1443). In contrast, Sikli in Central Anatolia, perhaps 1000 years older and having had a much smaller population, does have what are interpreted as public buildings which may have been a temple complex. Catalhoyuk houses have underfloor burials and murals on the walls "around a raised platform in one corner of the room that covered a large concentration of burials." with painting particularly common "on earlier layers of plaster that coincided in time with the burials of children." This could be interpreted as suggesting that religion in Catalhoyuk was a more personal affair than, say, the religion of the Stonehenge builders, with whatever they did being done as families at home.

On the other hand, Chris Scarre (Scarre 1996) uses Catalhoyuk as an example of the difficulties in identifying shrines, pointing out that about a third of the rooms had the features described above and that there are two alternative interpretations -- that those rooms were shrines, or that they were simply "richly decorated domestic dwellings in which ritual played a prominent role."

So where do we go from here? Where ritual has been a basic part of religion the symbolic communication that underlies ritual is generally dependent upon material artefacts and where these are found the tools of archaeology can hope to uncover at least some of their meaning for that society (Lisboa 1993/94). Ethnoarchaeology and analogy remain key tools for the understanding of ancient religion and need to be exploited further. Problem-centred excavation as discussed in Sears (Sears 1961) will be another. But as he says, "Limitations will always be with us. Perhaps our archaeological balance sheet will remain in the red, with imponderable liabilities continuing to outweigh exploitable assets."



Bibliography

Balter, M. (1998), ‘Why Settle Down? The Mystery of Communities', Science, 20 November 1998, Vol. 282

Bisson, M. and White, R.(1007) ‘Female Imagery from the Paleolothic: The Case of Grimaldi', Culture 1997 but found at [www.insticeagestudies.com]

Carver, M., (1993) ‘In Search of Cult', in Carver, M. In Search of Cult, The Boydell Press:Woodbridge, pp. v-ix

Dark, K.R (1995) Theoretical Archaeology, Ducksworth: London

Fagan, B.M. (1991), In the Beginning: An Introduction to Archaeology, 7th edition, HarperCollins:New York

Fagan, B.M. (1992) ‘A sexist view of prehistory', Archaeology Vol. 45 No.2

Fahtz, R. (1985), ‘The Martian Expedition to Wharram Percy' in New Approaches to Medieval Rural Settlement Hooke, D. (ed.), Oxford

Lewis-Williams, L.D. (1998) ‘Wrestling with Analogy', In Reader in Archaeological Theory: Post-Processual and Cognitive Approaches, edited by Whitley, D.S., Routledge:London pp.157-178

Lisboa, I. (1993/4) ‘Rationality and Irrationality: Religion in Prehistory', Journal of Theoretical Archaeology Vol. 3/4

Meskell, L, (1995) ‘Goddesses, Gimbutas and 'New Age' archaeology, Antiquity Vol.69 No.262

Rahtz, P. (1985) Archaeology, Basil Blackwell:Oxford

Renfrew, C. (1994) ‘The archaeology of Religion', in The Ancient Mind, Renfrew C and Zubrow E. Eds., Cambridge University Press:Cambridge

Renfrey C. And Bahn, P. (1996), Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 2nd edition, Thames and Hudson:London

Scarre, C. (1996). ‘Religion', in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, B. Fagan ed., Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp.590-593

Sears, W.H. (1961) ‘The Study of Social and Religious Systems in North American Archaeology', Current Anthropology, Vol. 2, No.3

Doug Weller

Director The Hall of Ma'at
Doug's Skeptical Archaeology site::
[www.ramtops.co.uk]