There was a time when Paleolithic cave paintings were construed primarily through the lens of “art,” an interpretive stance which assumes that at least some Paleolithic peoples were “artists” who painted for pleasure. Because this lens is so subjective (and creative), all manner of interpretations were offered. Whether prosaic or fanciful, this approach raised troubling [...]
Tags:altered states of consciousness·art history·ASC·cave art·cave paintings·dark zone art·David Lewis-Williams·doodles·entoptics·flutings·form constants·France·functionalism·hallucination·Jessica Cooney·Kevin Sharpe·Leslie Van Gelder·Paleolithic·petroglyphs·play·ritual·Rouffignac·shamans·symbolism
There are many ways in which China remains a cipher for Westerners, most of whom labor under the misapprehension that “modern civilization” originated in ancient Greece and spread slowly outward, eventually reaching “backwards” China and even then only in attenuated fashion. This of course ignores parallel and in some ways more spectacular developments in Neolithic [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·ancient China·Anne Underhill·burials·China·Chinese archaeology·Chinese Neolithic·Confucius·cult of ancestors·Donald Holzman·filial piety·KC Chang·lineages·macrocosm·microcosm·parents·stratification·transcendence
There was a time when Western classicists and metaphysicians searched high and low for the primordial or original religion: Ur-monotheismus. The thinking was that the original religion was monotheistic and that all non-monotheistic religions had degenerated from the pristine original.
This is of course precisely backwards but it has not stopped the search. While Ur-religionists chase [...]
Tags:Abraham·monotheism·original religion·polytheism·primordial religion·Sumerian·Ur·Urmonotheismus·ziggurat
The priest and paleontologist was present at the beginning, more or less. When the hoaxed Piltdown “fossils” were discovered in 1912 and the “Peking Man” (Homo erectus) site at Zhoukoudian was excavated in the 1940s, the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was there. What he was doing has always remained something of a mystery.
While [...]
Tags:Amir Aczel·convergence·Homo erectus·mysticism·Omega Point·Peking Man·Piltdown Man·Stephen Jay Gould·Teilhard de Chardin·The Jesuit & The Skull·Zhoukoudian
Head cheese may not be for everyone but it has an intensely devoted following. Most head cheese recipes call for the removal of brain, eyes, and ears before preparation, but purists scoff at this and include everything except bones. It is doubtful that Upper Paleolithic humans made head cheese; it is too time consuming. It [...]
Tags:Buran-Kaya·cannibalism·crania·Crimean Mountains·defleshing·diet·funeral·Goat's Head Soup·head cheese·head-hunting·mortuary·ritual·ritual behavior·rockshelter·Sandrine Plat·skulls·symbolic behavior·Upper Paleolithic
Indiana Jones would have loved it: 65,000 years ago, stone age hunters in Africa gathered at night in a hidden cave to worship the giant rock snake that seemed to move in the flickering firelight and hissingly promised fertility so long as the rituals were performed. They came to this place every year when the [...]
Tags:Biker Tony·Botswana·Bushmen·Indiana Jones·Kalahari·Middle Stone Age·Nick Walker·oldest religion·oldest ritual·python·Python Cave·Rhino Cave·ritualized behavior·San·shamans·Sheila Coulson·Sigrid Staurset·snake·Tsodilo Hills
Over at Live Science, Owen Jarus reports on a visually stunning and spooky mask recently discovered in Pennsylvania:
The lead archaeologist thinks the mask dates to about 900 AD and may have been used by a shaman. Other archaeologists think the mask may be more recent and aren’t sure whether it was a ritual or personal [...]
Tags:effigy·mask·Owen Jarus·shaman·Slipknot
Strange things are afoot at Catalhoyuk (7400-5600 BCE), one of the earliest and most important Neolithic (i.e., sedentary and agricultural) sites known to archaeology. As I noted in Bones, Burials and Ancestors, mortuary practices at Catalhoyuk were unusual and often involved secondary burial in the floors of homes.
The assumption has always been that these were [...]
Tags:ancestors·burials·Catalhoyuk·Clark Spencer Larsen·Crazy Horse·dental phenotype·fictive kinship·Ian Hodder·kin·kinship·Lakota·lineages·Marin Pilloud·mortuary practices·neolithic·sedentism·stratification·tooth morphology
In 2006, University of Oslo archaeologist Sheila Coulson gave an open lecture about her work at a small cave in the Tsodilo Hills of northern Botswana. Although her lecture focused on Middle Stone Age tools recovered from the cave and an unusual rock formation that looked to her like a snake or python, she also [...]
Tags:Africa·Alec Campbell·Botswana·Bushmen·cupules·George Brook·Larry Robbins·Michael Murphy·Middle Stone Age·Nyame Akuma·oldest religion·oldest ritual·python·Python Cave·Rhino Cave·sacrifice·San·Sheila Coulson·snake·Stanley Ambrose·Tsodilo Hills·worship
“It has long been recognized that any interpretation of prehistoric religious behavior should be based on concrete archaeological evidence. Yet evidence for Paleolithic belief systems is extremely scanty, and that which does exist is usually enigmatic — or as [Mircea] Eliade has expressed it, semantically opaque” (Freeman & Echegaray 1981).
Three lines of evidence are typically [...]
Tags:Cantabria·cave·dualism·El Juyo·El Juyo face·figurine·J. Gonzalez Echegaray·L.G. Freeman·Magdalenian·mask·methodology·Mircea Eliade·mobiliary·Orc·overinterpretation·Paleolithic·parietal·parsimony·ritual·Rorschach·sanctuary·Spain·temple
