In the Göbekli Tepe series opener, I noted that several claims have been made about this 11,000 year old archaeological site:
It was built by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary or village agriculturalists.
It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
The massive stone pillars or megaliths were “temples” or “shrines.”
Göbekli [...]
Tags:Anna Belfer-Cohen·complex hunter-gatherers·Edward Banning·Gobekli Tepe·houses·Klaus Schmidt·Levant·megaliths·monoliths·Neolithicization·Neolithization·Nigel Goring-Morris·shrines·So Fair a House·temples
When it comes to classic anthropology, Margaret Mead may garner the lionesses’ share of attention but Ruth Benedict remains the matriarch. Although Benedict today is dismissed by some as a quaint relic of the “culture and personality” school of anthropology, such demurrals underestimate the theoretical sophistication and continuing relevance of Benedict’s work.
Those who understand Patterns [...]
Tags:Apollo·Chrysanthemum and the Sword·culture and personality school·Dionysius·Dobu·Franz Boas·Great Plains·Japan·Kwakiutl·Margaret Mead·Native American·Nietzsche·nomads·particularism·Patterns of Culture·Plains culture area·psychoanalytic·Ruth Benedict·shamans·thick description·variation·vision quest·Zuni
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
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
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 1977, Stephen King published his short story “Children of the Corn” in Penthouse. Seven years later, movie audiences across the nation were horrified by the ritual doings of small town Nebraska kids who worshiped something malevolent in the corn.
It surely was no coincidence that later in the year, Nebraska experienced a sharp drop in [...]
Tags:agriculture·arousal·Aztecs·Children of the Corn·crucifixion·Daily Mass·doctrinal·Engels·episodic·Gatlin·Harvey Whitehouse·HRAF·imagistic·intensity·Linda Hamilton·Marx·memory·modes of religiosity·morphospace·Nebraska·neolithic·pagan·political economy·Quentin Atkinson·ritual form·Salah·Sarah Connor·scythe·semantic·Stephen King·Sun Dance·vision quest
Before there were materialist explanations of nature’s unpredictable fury, there were stories. These stories were not mere entertainment, but were attempts to make sense of that which was inexplicable. The world is of course an unpredictable place. We were powerfully reminded of this but one month ago, as an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan.
Modern Japanese [...]
Tags:Alan McMillan·Cascadia·causation·dwarfs·earthquake·Ian Hutchinson·Japan·Julie Cruikshank·Kwakiutl·materialist explanations·mountain dwarfs·Northwest Coast·Nuu-chah-nulth·Nuxalk·oral traditions·Salish·sea spirits·seismic events·stories·storytelling·subduction·supernatural explanations·tsunami
Over the past few years, something like a perfect storm has been brewing over human pair bonding and the profound impacts it has wrought on human social structure. This is a welcome development in a field that has long been dominated by those who wish to root the relatively modern idea of marriage in ancient [...]
Tags:adaptive suite·Ardi·Ardipithecus·Bernard Chapais·bilateral kinship·C. Owen Lovejoy·canine reduction·extended kinship·fictive kinship·Frank Marlowe·group competition·group composition·group size·human origins·Kim Hill·life history·male aggression·male provisioning·marriage·marriage covenants·marriage rituals·pair bond·pair bonding·promiscuity·umbrella hypothesis
Over at Archaeology News, Jasmyne Pendragon (gotta love that name!) has posted the first and second installments of a three part series on “The Purpose of Aztec Blood Rituals.” Helpfully, the articles contain numerous citations and complete references. In part one, Pendragon briefly sets the historical stage before laying out the details of Aztec beliefs:
The [...]
Tags:Aztec Indians·Aztec sacrifice·Aztecs·blood·blood rituals·bloodletting·bloodlust·cannibalism·conquest·ecology·economy·emic·empire·etic·Jasmyne Pendragon·Valley of Mexico
Over at the Atlantic, Kenneth Brower has written a superb article on the brilliant iconoclast and physicist Freeman Dyson. He undoubtedly qualifies as a genius and one of the world’s leading scientists, which makes his anti-position on global warming either puzzling or quixotic.
One explanation for Dyson’s contrarian stance is that he sees environmentalists as religionists [...]
Tags:Avatar·David Brower·ecology·environmentalism·Ernesto Zedillo·Freeman Dyson·Gaia Hypothesis·global warming·James Lovelock·Kenneth Brower·nature worship·Sierra Club·Vatican·William Nordhaus
