Though it isn’t possible to do Jaynes justice in a short space, his most famous idea was that the ancient human mind was of two parts: it was “bicameral.” Inspired by research showing the brain is right-left specialized, Jaynes hypothesized that in the evolutionary past the left brain must have been completely separated from the right brain. The effect, according to Jaynes, would have been disquieting: language generated in the left brain would have been interpreted by the right brain as coming from outside or somewhere else. Ancient people, in other words, were functionally lobotomized and regularly experienced auditory hallucinations. These voices were called gods and this supposedly explains the origin of religion. For Jaynes, the bicameral mind lacked what he calls “consciousness.”

With this hypothesis in hand Jaynes began scouring the historical record looking for evidence of bicamerality. In the Iliad, an ancient oral poem finally written down around 800 BCE, Jaynes thinks he has found it:

[I]f you take the generally accepted oldest parts of the Iliad and ask, “Is there evidence of consciousness?” the answer, I think, is no. People are not sitting down and making decisions. No one is. No one is introspecting. No one is even reminiscing. It is a very different kind of world.

Then, who makes the decisions? Whenever a significant choice is to be made, a voice comes in telling people what to do. These voices are always and immediately obeyed. These voices are called gods. To me this is the origin of gods. I regard them as auditory hallucinations similar to, although not precisely the same as, the voices heard by Joan of Arc or William Blake. Or similar to the voices that modern schizophrenics hear. Verbal hallucinations are common today, but in early civilization I suggest that they were universal.

Jaynes must then explain the origin and evolution of the bicameral or “unconscious” mind, which he does here:

But why is there such a mentality as a bicameral mind? Let us go back to the beginning of civilization in several sites in the Near East around 9000 B.C. It is concomitant with the beginning of agriculture. The reason the bicameral mind may have existed at this particular time is because of the evolutionary pressures for a new kind of social control to move from small hunter-gatherer groupings to large agriculture based towns or cities. The bicameral mentality could do this since it enabled a large group to carry around with them the directions of the chief or king as verbal hallucinations, instead of the chieftain having to be present at all times.

I think that verbal hallucinations had evolved along with the evolution of language during the Neanderthal era as aids to attention and perseverance in tasks, but then became the way of ruling larger groups.

Setting aside for a moment the objection that modern humans are only minimally descended from Neanderthals and we don’t know whether they had language, Jaynes obviously believes that bicamerality is ancient and ancestral. All humans, in other words, descended from these hallucinating hunter-gatherers. Much later in time some of these hunter-gatherers (those in the Near East) developed agriculture and the “voices” were pressed into the service of social control. Even when the ruler-god isn’t present, people hear voices and attribute the commands of those voices to the ruler-god.

It’s all very tidy. The problem, however, is that the bicameral mind on which everything is built and depends eventually breaks down. The story that Jaynes tells about the breakdown is remarkable, indeed fascinating, but for my purposes the details are unimportant. All we need to know is that in complex agricultural societies, pressures and contradictions increase until the bicameral mind finally dissolves: it becomes unified or unicameral. This is the beginning, for Jaynes, of “consciousness.” It is the hallmark of fully modern minds which recognize the voice inside the head not as “god” but as “I.”

It is that this point that Jaynes’ story, still believed by many, runs into deep trouble: some groups of people never practiced agriculture, never lived in complex societies, and never experienced a breakdown of bicameralism. These people are of course hunter-gatherers, many of whom continued foraging until relatively recently and some of whom still do. These groups, descended directly from the hallucinating ancients, presumably retained bicameral minds and lacked “consciousness.”

If this were the case (it isn’t), our histories and ethnographies would be filled with fantastic and unbelievable tales about bicameral hunter-gatherers. They would have been strange beings incapable of recognizing that the voices inside their heads weren’t real. While this is the obvious implication of Jaynes’ theory, we needn’t take my word for it. Here is how recent “pre-literate tribal” people are described by the Jaynes Society:

They have limited inner mental life (and experience frequent auditory hallucinations) but they can be just as animated as non-human primates are. Bicameral people were non-conscious but intelligent, had basic language, and were probably more social than modern conscious people in the sense that they would have typically lived and worked surrounded by others. They would be able to express first tier (non-conscious) emotions such as fear, shame, and anger, but not second-tier (conscious) emotions such as anxiety, guilt, and hatred.

This is stunning. It reads like a racist Victorian description of non-European subhumans, and if I didn’t just pull it from a website advocating Jaynes’ views, that’s what I would think it was.

Here is how we know Jaynes is wrong: there is no evidence that historically recent hunter-gatherers were or are biologically-neurologically different or that their minds were metaphorically bifurcated. Nothing in the ethnohistoric or ethnographic record suggests this and in fact the opposite is true. What we find in the record is that these people, despite their different histories and cultures, were (and are) just like us.

Reference:

Jaynes, Julian. (1986). Consciousness and The Voices of the Mind. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 27 (2), 128-148 DOI: 10.1037/h0080053

This new perspective owes much to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He has been at the forefront of research into moral decision-making, which is grounded in evolutionary theory. Because people have been living in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, it really isn’t surprising that prosocial or “moral” behaviors are often the result of intuition or snap judgments that are later explained by recourse to reason. Humans are the most prosocial of primates and it would be surprising if this ability were not highly developed.

In recent years Haidt has extended these basic insights to politics and other domains (such as religion), where the terrain is much more uneven and confounded by modern culture. The ideas, in other words, have been extended and applied in ways that are questionable. In this recent article on Haidt from The Chronicle, the overextension is apparent.

After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:

A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.

If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.

Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.

Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Todd Schorr's "Hunter Gatherer"

I’ve spent several years immersed in the ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record and can’t recall much or any concern with liberty-oppression. This is the kind of concern that arises when you have centralized authority and government, which were absent for most of human history. Nor can I recall much concern for authority-subversion. Again, these kinds of concerns are related to centralized authority and government which didn’t exist in our hunting-gathering past. While hunting-gathering societies are concerned with ritual purity, translating this as sanctity-degradation has a distinctly Axial feel to it. Degradation, in particular, smacks of the Christian fall from grace.

Haidt’s “foundational morals” aren’t innate or universal. The list is provincial, limited in both time and space. Had Haidt tested his list against history or made cross-cultural comparisons, this would have been evident.

These efforts, while interesting and instructive, haven’t really grappled with the ways in which particular kinds of creation myths perform particular kinds of psycho-cultural work in the present. I have yet to see, for instance, an analysis of the ways in which the Edenic creation myth, in its structural and thematic details, frames a particular kind of individuated self and conditions a particular kind of collective culture. I suspect there are constitutive links between certain kinds of myths and certain kinds of identities. Identifying and tracing these links would seem to be a fruitful task but may be much easier said than done.

If links between particular kinds of myth and particular kinds of culture exist, the search for connections would begin with a thematic classification and mapping of the myths. This has been done for the creation myths of North American Indians. Anna Birgitta Rooth examined over 300 creation myths collected from North American natives and discerned 8 thematic types:

1. The Earth-Diver: this myth involves some being, often an animal, who dives to the bottom of an ocean to get sand or mud from which the earth and its denizens are created. It is found all over North America except for Arizona and New Mexico (i.e., the Puebloan area). Interestingly, the earth-diver creation myth is also widespread in Eurasia.

2. The World-Parents: this myth tells of a sky-father and earth-mother who jointly produce the earth and all living things. This usually involves the earth-mother giving birth and the fertility symbolism is heavy. This myth is found primarily in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Similar myths can be found outside of North America in Japan and Polynesia.

3. The Emergence: this myth involves a hole in the earth or a cave from which humans and animals emerge to the present world. It is found primarily in the southwest Puebloan area with some spillover the the adjacent Plains. This is the primary form of creation myth found in Meso-America.

4. The Spider as First Being: in this myth the spider is the first being who spins a web that holds the earth together or makes it firm and thus makes it possible for other beings to exist on it. How these other beings come into existence is highly variable, but the spider is at the center of the entire cosmology. Versions of this myth can also be found in south America and China.

5. The Fighting or Robbery: this myth recounts the heroic deeds of a culture hero or transformer who steals the earth and its creations from greedy, pre-existing beings who have been hoarding for themselves. The transformer then gives these gifts to humanity. This is the most common form of creation myth among Northwest Coast Indians and finds parallels in northeast Asia.

6. The Ymir: in this myth the world is created from the corpse of a dead giant or a dead man or woman. The skull is made into the sky, the bones become rocks, the hair becomes vegetation, and the blood becomes water. It is found throughout the North American continent. It is similarly widespread in Eurasia, and has interesting parallels with the Edenic myth.

7. The Two Creators Contest: this highly varied myth involves two creators, often siblings or relatives, who engage in a contest to “make” the best things with the result being the creation of the world and its contents. In some variations the world is created as a byproduct of a contest between the two. This myth is found in all areas of North America and has parallels in Asia.

8. The Blind Brother: this myth tells of two brothers who rise from the depths of the ocean bringing people with them. One brother tricks the other in a way that results in blindness; the blind brother in his anger then visits hardship on the people who have come to earth. This myth is found only in southern California and Arizona, and it told in adjacent parts of Mexico. Its distribution seems limited to these areas.

Rooth includes maps for each creation myth type showing where they can be found; although she doesn’t provide a single comprehensive map, a composite overlay would show that the myths have geographic clusters but don’t seem to correlate to any particular kind of culture (i.e., woodlands, coastal, horticultural, nomadic, Plains, Puebloan) or language area. As a cultural diffusionist writing in the 1950s, Rooth does find some attenuated connections which she describes in very general terms.

Her classifications and maps clearly indicate a complex history of migrations and contacts. The latter has resulted in several kinds of syncretic creation myths, many of which can be found in roughly similar forms outside of the Americas or in the Old World. It would take a tremendous effort to test the hypothesis that certain kinds of cultural structures correlate with certain kinds of creation myths. It could be done using the Human Relations Area Files, which codes for cultural variables but not necessarily for kinds of creation myth.

Because I don’t think this will be done anytime soon, where does this leave us? Probably nowhere. I can’t discern even the barest hints of a relationship between the structure of these societies and types of creation myths. What I have learned is that the Edenic myth, though dominant in some parts of the world, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to types and varieties of creation myths. They seem limited only by the imagination, which is to say not limited at all.

Reference:

Rooth, Anna B. (1957). The Creation Myths of the North American Indians Anthropos, 52 (3/4), 497-508

This is a splendid example of therianthropy, a common trope in shamanic practice whereby humans morph or shape-shift into animals. While this may seem like a simple figurine, its significance is larger: the carver worked with two images in his mind’s eye (a lion and a human) and fused them to create something entirely new. The resulting symbol is indicative of fully modern cognition.

The Lion-Man is back in the news because nearly 1,000 additional pieces have been found. As reported by Spiegel, the additional pieces may help resolve an unfruitful debate:

The poor condition of the figurine has only made it more mysterious. Is it meant to represent a mythical creature, or a shaman hiding under an animal hide? The genitalia are unrecognizable. German archeologist and Upper Paleolithic expert Joachim Hahn has interpreted the small plate on the abdomen as a “penis in a hanging position.” Elisabeth Schmid, a paleontologist, classified it as a pubic triangle.

It was the beginning of a bitter dispute over the gender of the small idol that erupted in the 1980s and continues to this day. The statue has been made into an “icon of the women’s movement,” says Kurt Wehrberger of the Ulm Museum, the owner of the precious object.

Those who believe that the Lion Man is in fact a woman are convinced that primitive societies were matriarchal. They contend that women of the period, instead of standing obediently by the cooking fire and watching over the children, hunted mammoths and set the tone when it came to rituals and the priesthood. But is this true?

Even if the new pieces allow us to determine gender, this single figurine won’t say much about the societal structure of the presumably small group who used the cave. It certainly won’t tell us anything about the structure of Paleolithic societies that were spread widely in space and time.

If the ethnohistoric record is any guide, Paleolithic hunting-gathering societies would not have been gender-fixed or sex-determined. There may have been a rough sexual division of labor as there seems to be among most foragers, but this division doesn’t determine matriarchy or patriarchy. To give but one example, Sioux chiefs who married Cheyenne women would join the wife’s band. Simple dichotomies such as patriarchy/matriarchy can’t even begin to capture the resulting complexities.

These kinds of things are fluid and differ from place to place, often in accord with local traditions. It seems safe to say that during the long course of the Paleolithic, there was no essential societal structure and we can’t generalize from a single sample such as the Lion-Man or Lioness-Woman.

When fully modern humans left Africa around 75,000 years ago, they almost certainly carried some form of shamanism with them. It is even possible that humans they encountered along the way — those whose ancestors had left Africa during earlier migrations (such as Neanderthals and Denisovans) — were shamanic. We know that some of these encounters involved genetic mixing; they also probably involved ritual mixing. Indeed, having sex with different looking and sounding strangers may have been richly imbued with ritual.

Whatever the case, one thing is certain: wherever humans went, so too did shamanism. It is found throughout Africa, Near East, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Australia, Arctic, and Americas. If you look at any map which shows migration routes from Africa and colonization of the world, the map shows not just the movement of people over tens of thousands of years: it also shows the spread of shamanisms.

All humans were hunter-gatherers and shamanic until the advent of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. But wherever agriculture takes hold in any kind of intensive way, shamanism is transformed into something that looks more like what we today call “religion.” It becomes, in other words, more organized, systematic, and doctrinal. The primacy of individual supernaturalism, a hallmark of shamanism, gives way to collective supernaturalism or formal religions.

In isolated areas where foraging and small-scale horticulture persisted for longer periods of time, so too did shamanism. Traditional shamanism exists today primarily in small-scale societies such as those found in the Amazon and New Guinea. As an ancient practice which many deem to be closer to the “primordial supernatural source,” it is hardly surprising that it has been appropriated and commodified for global use. Commercial neo-shamanism thrives in places like New York, Paris, and Tokyo.

Traditional shamanism was not, however, wholly replaced by Neolithic religions created to meet the needs of agricultural and large-scale societies. As Robert Bellah frequently observes when discussing the history of religions: “nothing is ever lost.” There is in other words a bit of shamanism in all religions today. Ideas about souls, spirits, gods, other-worlds, after-lives, possession, prophecy, and divination were all developed within shamanism and existed for many thousands of years before the earliest religions formalized and systematized them.

This process of incorporation and domestication did not completely subsume shamanism. Strands of shamanism persisted in more traditional forms, especially in rural areas, and elements of it continued to be practiced at the margins under different names: oracles, mediums, healers, diviners, psychics, seers, clairvoyants, sorcerers, and witches. Within more established religions, people who privileged and cultivated the shamanic substrates of those traditions are known as mystics, sages, gurus, prophets, and saints. Shamanism runs as deep as it does wide, and a splendid book on the shamanic aspects of Christianity is begging to be written.

While waiting for this genealogy of shamanic Christianity, it may be less threatening to trace the transformational course of shamanic practice in Japan, where supernatural syncretism has long been the norm. Where syncretism prevails, it is easier to acknowledge borrowings and debts.

In 1975 Carmen Blacker published The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan and highlighted the prevalence of Japanese “folk” beliefs that run alongside and mix with official Shinto and temple Buddhism. In “Witch Animals” (open), Blacker examines belief in animals who have spirits that can be cultivated as household guardians. This is a common idea among hunter-gatherers in general and Amerindians in particular; the latter famously sought visions to identify an animal whose spirit would become a lifelong companion and protector. In “Exorcism” (open), Blacker examines the belief that physical-mental illnesses are caused by spirit maleficence or possession, the cure for which is exorcism. Similar beliefs are found in nearly all shamanic societies, with the cure being a ritualized extraction or casting out.

Blacker is aware of these shamanic connections and suggests in early chapters (open) that Japanese “folk” practices are rooted in an ancient hunting and gathering past. That such practices have persisted is remarkable in light of Meiji period (1868-1912) efforts to modernize Japan, one programmatic aspect of which was to root out shamanic “superstitions” and create a national tradition which conformed to the Western concept and category of “religion.”

Although such superstitions were by the time of the Meiji period identified mostly with Buddhism, this had not always been the case. When Buddhists first arrived in Japan around 550 CE, they encountered an intensely spiritualized landscape that was deeply informed by indigenous Japanese shamanism. This shamanism arose in conjunction with the Jomon peoples, who hunted and gathered in Japan from 14,000-300 BCE, a spectacularly long run during which they built permanent settlements, made pottery, and developed rituals.

As Buddhism developed in Japan it did so not by displacing traditional beliefs developed over 14,000 years, but rather by incorporating and accepting them. This meant that over the centuries Japanese Buddhism developed into a distinctive amalgam described here by Jason A. Josephson:

During the Tokugawa period [1603-1868] the vast majority of interaction between priests and parishioners was for the purpose of practical, this-worldly benefits (genze riyaku 現世利益) or memorial rituals for the dead (kuyō 供養). The day-to-day life of Buddhist priests of all sects was filled with the performance of exorcisms, funerals, distributing healing charms, and spells for rain.

Many of these rituals were intended for apotropaic purposes, banishing monsters, limiting their negative effects, or transforming the curses of ancestors and kami into blessings. Hungry ghosts (gaki 餓鬼) and demons (oni 鬼 or ma 魔) were an integral part of the worldview promoted by the Buddhist establishment; and one of the main benefits of seemingly unconnected activities such as lay ordination rituals, for instance, was to manage these sorts of supernatural entities. Despite later revisionism, both demons and this-worldly magic were fundamental to Buddhism—in canonical texts and in daily practices.

While Buddhist priests were performing these ancient (shamanic) rites during the medieval Tokugawa period (1603-1868), this had not always been the case. For centuries prior, Buddhist priests had been learning this craft from female shamans known as miko. In a recent article on spirit mediums or miko in pre-Tokugawa Japan, Lori Meeks observes that miko were often ensconced in or around temples where they performed a variety of services that were much in demand but were not on official Buddhist offer:

[W]e can find many examples of miko who engaged in a variety of closely linked spiritual services, such as the transmission of oracles from gods and bodhisattvas, which was thought to occur through divine trance; channeling spirits of the dead; divine petition, which sometimes involved exorcism; fortune-telling; rituals and blessings for romantic relationships and childbirth; and physical healing.

Both shrine miko and arukimiko also developed extensive repertoires of spiritual services meant to meet the needs of individual patrons: the conjuring of dead spirits, divination, love rites, and physical healing.

Although miko were tolerated, accommodated, and sometimes celebrated in medieval Japan, they were often viewed with suspicion by government officials attempting to impose control and maintain order in collaboration with more placid and malleable temple Buddhists. Miko were recognized as shamanic atavists and may have served as reminders of an unruly populace or anarchic past. The fact that miko carried drums and danced connects them directly to shamans, as does the fact they were healers.

When it comes to shamans or those who carry on aspects of shamanic tradition within larger-scale societies, the usual course is for shamanic functions to be co-opted by mainstream religious traditions or relegated to the periphery where they are denigrated as “superstition.” The latter epithet is euphemism for “supernatural beliefs not fitted within recognized religions or traditional doctrines.” From the priest to the palmist, all supernatural practitioners are indebted to the universal shaman.

References:

Meeks, Lori (2011). The Disappearing Medium: Reassessing the Place of Miko in the Religious Landscape of Premodern Japan
History of Religions, 50 (3), 208-260 DOI: 10.1086/656611

Josephson, Jason A. (2006). When Buddhism Became a “Religion”: Religion and Superstition in the Writings of Inoue Enryō Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 33 (1), 143-168

Habu, Junko (2008). Growth and decline in complex hunter-gatherer societies: a case study from the Jomon period Sannai Maruyama site, Japan Antiquity, 82, 571-584

Though we don’t know when humans first gained the ability to talk, my guess is that one of the first topics of protracted conversation revolved around dreams. Making sense of dreams surely was a priority. My guess is also that those who offered the most convincing explanations or interpretations were the first shamans.

It probably did not take long for these early shamans, whose status derived at least in part from their ability to interpret or make sense of dreams, to discover that dream-like states could be induced outside of sleep. Physical exertions and deprivations could lead to trance states and hallucinations. Psychotropic plants could do the same.

Shamans the world over interpret these experiences as soul flights. From a shamanic perspective, the problem with sleep-dream soul flights is they are hard to control. While some control can be gained through training or what is called lucid dreaming, there is greater possibility for control and direction when one is awake. This may explain why shamanic societies tend to place greater emphasis on deliberately induced trance states than they do on sleeping dream states.

In shamanic societies, the tight linkage between supernatural beliefs on the one hand and dreams-trances-visions on the other is not in doubt. The traditional exemplar comes Australian Aborigines, whose supernatural cycle is known as Dreamtime or Dreaming. Other well-known examples come from the San of southern Africa with their trance dance and the Plains Indians with their vision quest. In Amazonia, the use of psychotropics to induce “spiritual” hallucinations or soul flights has long been famous.

In all these cases, sleep dreaming has taken a back seat to deliberately induced altered states of consciousness. An interesting exception to this comes from the historic Iroquois, whose supernatural beliefs were structured in large part around sleep dreaming and the interpretation of dreams. In Jesuit Relations (1610-1791), which constitutes one of our best sources on Amerindian life during the early contact period, missionaries characterized sleep-dreaming as “the Iroquois divinity.”

This is a fascinating twist on the dream-trance-vision complex and its relationship to supernatural beliefs. I can’t help but wonder whether it constitutes a survival of sorts or whether it is a unique development that presaged Freud by hundreds of years.

E.B. Banning suggests something along these lines in “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East” (Current Anthropology 2011). Banning exhaustively reviews the Göbekli evidence and challenges the prevailing interpretation of the site. This is precisely what was needed and it shows archaeology working as a science.

In his very first site report from 1998, Schmidt had already concluded that Göbekli was a ritual center and claimed the “archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.” As Banning’s article shows, the evidence is not overwhelming and the claims that have been made about Göbekli are refutable.

After surveying the evidence and various claims made by Schmidt, Banning offers an alternative view. It is a view informed by lessons learned from history and theory. The history comes from another famous Neolithic site, Çatalhöyük, which was first excavated in the 1960s by James Mellart. Mellart interpreted richly decorated structures as ritual “shrines” and claimed they were not residential. It was later found that the so-called “shrines” were in fact houses.

The theory comes from the ethnographically informed realization that binaries such as sacred/profane and secular/religious are post-Enlightenment Western constructs rather than human universals. By extension and association, this means that the ritual/domestic binary is either suspect or provincial. None of these binaries can be projected uncritically back in time and mapped onto 11,000 year old ruins. Historically situated and modern conceptions are not reliable guides to ancient cosmologies. And given what we know about most non-Western cosmologies, it seems unlikely that the Göbekli world was constructed or perceived through these binaries.

It is more likely that the sacred/profane existed on a continuum and were conjoined, as were ritual and domestic activities. With these things in mind, Banning observes: “The point is not that specialized shrines are incompatible with domestic ritual but that evidence for ritual or conspicuous symbolism does not automatically imply specialized temples.”

These salutary reminders out of the way, Banning turns to the nub of the Göbekli issue: “The question is whether the evidence justifies the site’s interpretation, as its excavator argues, as a hunter-gatherer cult center with no domestic occupation at all.” To answer it, Banning examines several aspects of the site: (a) the famous T-shaped pillars which Schmidt asserts were free-standing, open-air monoliths (similar to those at Stonehenge), (b) the supposed lack of evidence for household or domestic activities, (c) the alleged lack of access to water and (d) the ostensible absence of domesticated plants-animals.

For each, Banning points to contradictory evidence and suggests looking for additional corroborating or refuting evidence. In some cases this involves nothing more than looking at the existing evidence differently, more closely, or without preconceptions. In all cases, Banning finds the evidence or lack thereof equivocal.

If the Göbekli structures were in fact unroofed, it surely follows they were not houses. Beginning with a structural examination of the pillars, Banning suggests they are placed and buttressed in a manner that would have supported overhead wooden beams, which in turn would have been thatched. There are several hints (ranging from grooves and notches to wood) that this may in fact have been the case, and Banning has sketched one possible layout:

Göbekli’s T-shaped pillars are arranged in the round and may seem completely unique (which they are in terms of size alone), yet it turns out that similar pillars and arrangements are found at other Neolithic sites in the area, and in several cases these structures are residential.

Aside from the structures themselves, the most remarkable feature of Göbekli is that it was discovered virtually intact. Fortuitously for archaeologists, Göbekli’s users (whether occupants or visitors) periodically filled earlier and older structures with surrounding debris and built on top of them. After its final use, the site was again filled. This explains why the site went unrecognized for so long; it looked like just another hill.

Banning is particularly interested in the huge amounts of fill material that were used and which he suspects was created on site as a result of occupation:

Notably, the site’s deep deposits also exhibit high densities of lithics—including a variety of points, scrapers, burins, and sickle blades—as well as evidence for “all stages of production.” One might expect to find stone tools related to the quarrying and manufacture of limestone monoliths and debris from the tools’ manufacture, but those in the fills, at least, are not noticeably different from what one might expect to find in a domestic deposit.

There is also abundant animal bone while dark earth found in the soil horizons may be anthropogenic, probably associated with the high density of bone fragments and other organic materials. Plant remains are not well preserved in these deposits but include a broad suite of edible wild seeds and the charcoal of trees such as ash, almond, poplar, and Brant’s oak that could have furnished both fuel and roof timbers.

In addition, Banning identifies possible hearths or hearth rings and mortars that would have been used to process grain. Some of these are bedrock mortars, which I happened to notice — near what appears to be a large cistern — in privately taken pictures of the site. The cistern is interesting because it speaks to the issue of water: Schmidt asserts that Göbekli had no easy or reliable access to this essential resource.

It would be unwise to assume that the lack of water at the site today is indicative of the situation 11,000 years ago:

[D]uring Göbekli Tepe’s occupation around 8000 cal BC, during the early Boreal period, the climate was considerably more humid than the current 450 mm of mean annual precipitation would suggest, and the water table was likely rather higher, potentially with springs closer to the site that no longer exist. Deforestation and modern irrigation projects have also had serious impacts on local water tables and streamflow, making the present distribution of water a poor indicator of Neolithic water sources.

Indeed, the many different kinds of (moisture-loving) plant remains found at the site suggest that water fell or flowed in amounts sufficient to nourish them.

In Schmidt’s estimation, these plant remains are — like the abundant animal remains — significant because they do not show signs of domestication. Aside from the difficulties of identifying domestication on the basis of morphology (with domesticated seeds being larger and domesticated animals smaller), Göbekli is a transitional Neolithic site. Hunting and gathering did not simply stop when people began planting seeds and controlling animals or domesticating them.

During this transitional period, plants and animals on the way to domestication may not look like their wild counterparts or may be “tweeners.” Of course some of these plants and animals were never domesticated; their presence is best explained by a mixed economy: there was some hunting and gathering of non-domesticates while at the same time others were being selected for domestication.

Where does this leave us? Banning has an idea and states it forcefully, though not in precisely this order:

While there is no doubt that Göbekli Tepe is an important site and that aspects of its structures were symbolically loaded, the claim that the site had no residential occupation is simply not credible.

Most likely, either the famous “temples” are actually houses or houses lie elsewhere on the site and are simply not represented or not yet identified in the excavated sample.

In short, there is no strong reason to assume that the people who used the buildings at Göbekli Tepe, in any stratum, were not Neolithic villagers.

Ignoring even the possibility that some of the claimed shrines and temples at Neolithic sites may have been houses or other types of buildings, however, could distort our interpretations not only of Neolithic religion but of nonreligious aspects of the communities that inhabited or used those sites.

So fair a holy house indeed. In the next and final post in the Göbekli series, we will synthesize the materials from the previous ones and take stock of the whole.

Reference:

Banning, E.B. (2011). So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Current Anthropology, 52 (5), 619-660 : 10.1086/661207

The first report — “Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Ritual” — appeared in 1998. After noting that his views are preliminary, Schmidt contrasts Göbekli with similar sites whose location can be explained because they have water access, agricultural land, and hunting grounds. Göbekli seemingly lacked these things, a fact which makes its location puzzling. For Schmidt, this suggests Göbekli was sited for “non-profane” or sacred reasons.

Here Schmidt deploys Emile Durkheim’s problematic sacred-profane dichotomy that is closely related to (and probably derives from) the Enlightenment construct of secular-religious. A corollary of this dichotomy is a distinction between ritual and non-ritual activities, which Schmidt applies to Göbekli:

[R]itual activity, aside from burials, is not normally an archaeologically predictable phenomenon, and evidence for such special events is certainly rare in the earlier prehistoric archaeological record. Göbekli Tepe, on the other hand, apparently was a special location devoted to very important specific rituals, at least for a certain time. The archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.

After only a few years of excavation, Schmidt was clearly impressed by the size and scale of the megalithics and their seemingly anomalous placement on the landscape. Already, Schmidt had concluded that Göbekli was a ritual or religious site and the evidence was not only “overwhelming” but also “irrefutable.” With perhaps 1-2% of the total site having been excavated at that time (based on estimates that 5% has been excavated through 2011), these are interesting assertions.

In 2001, Schmidt published “Göbekli Tepe: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations.” In this report Schmidt affirms and extends his previous conclusions:

The function of these buildings can only be characterized as associated with ritual purposes, and no serious claim for domestic use is tenable. It is clear that Gobekli Tepe was not an early Neolithic settlement with some ritual buildings, but that the whole site served a mainly ritual function. It was a mountain sanctuary.

Whatever Göbekli represents, it is even more astonishing given Schmidt’s assertion — based on the ostensible fact that only “wild” or non-domesticated plant remains and animal bones had been found — that it was constructed by hunter-gatherers who must have periodically come together for ritual reasons. Schmidt then suggests that ritual or religion spurred the domestication of plant-animals and caused the Neolithic Revolution:

Cauvin’s connection between the profane and the sacred, is a perfect guide to understand the change of the hunter-gatherer societies to the Neolithic way of life, not only through economic or ecological reasons, but by the impact of a transcendental sphere….Gordon Childe’s Neolithic Revolution is getting a new facet, the religious one.

Here Schmidt references French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin, who controversially argues in The Birth of the Gods and Origins of Agriculture (2000) that hunter-gatherers developed more complex religious ideas before they domesticated plants-animals, and that the Neolithic Revolution was the result rather than a cause. Schmidt obviously agrees and interprets Göbekli as proof.

In “Göbekli Tepe — The Stone Age Sanctuaries” (2010), Schmidt details recent finds and interprets them in light of his earlier conclusions:

Göbekli Tepe was not used for habitation; it consists of several sanctuaries in the form of round megalithic enclosures. [N]o residential buildings have been discovered. However, at least two phases of monumental religious architecture have been uncovered.

[T]here is no question that the site of Göbekli Tepe was not a mundane settlement of the period, but a site belonging to the religious sphere, a sacred area, since the excavation has revealed no residential buildings. Göbekli Tepe seems to have been a regional centre where communities met to engage in complex rites.

So the general function of the enclosures remains mysterious; but it is clear that the pillar statues in the centre of these enclosures represented very powerful beings. If gods existed in the minds of Early Neolithic people, there is an overwhelming probability that the T-shape is the first know monumental depiction of gods.

Schmidt then asserts that a religious revolution caused the Neolithic Revolution:

There are no domesticated animals or plants. The enclosures date to the period of transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer societies during the 10th and 9th millennia in the Near East. The evolution of modern humanity involved a fundamental change from small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer bands to large, permanently co-resident communities.

Jacques Cauvin’s suggestions were correct: the factor that allowed the formation of large, permanent communities was the facility to use symbolic culture, a kind of pre-literate capacity for producing and ‘reading’ symbolic material culture, that enabled communities to formulate their shared identities, and their cosmos.

Although Schmidt offers several possibilities for interpreting Göbekli’s rich symbolism, he does not explain (in either this article or others) what might have caused this religious revolution. If radically different ideas led the way to domestication and “civilization,” how do we account for the development of these ideas?

This seminal question aside, there are others. In the next post we will look at E.B. Banning’s recent article in Current Anthropology which challenges Schmidt’s interpretation of Göbekli.

References:

Schmidt, Klaus (1998). Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Rituals from Gobekli Tepe Neo-Lithics, 2, 1-5

Schmidt, Klaus (2001). Gobekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations Paleorient, 26 (1), 45-54

Schmidt, Klaus (2010). Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries: New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs Documenta Praehistorica, XXXVII, 239-256

I wouldn’t normally look to popular press coverage to determine what an archaeologist is thinking or saying, but in this case it seems warranted, primarily because Schmidt has been interviewed for many of the articles and makes similar claims in his professional publications (which will be the subject of the next post). So let’s look at some of this coverage, which has garnered worldwide attention.

The most recent is National Geographic’s “The Birth of Religion” (June 2011) which comes with this byline: “We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.” Discussing the people who built and used the site, Schmidt stated:

These people were foragers, people who gathered plants and hunted wild animals. Our picture of foragers was always just small, mobile groups, a few dozen people. They cannot make big permanent structures, we thought, because they must move around to follow the resources. They can’t maintain a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can’t carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then here is Göbekli Tepe, and they obviously did that.

The author then contextualizes Schmidt’s claims:

Anthropologists have assumed that organized religion began as a way of salving the tensions that inevitably arose when hunter-gatherers settled down, became farmers, and developed large societies….Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt’s way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization.

In 2008, the Smithsonian covered Göbekli in “The World’s First Temple?” Interviewed for the piece, Schmidt asserts that Göbekli is “the first human-built holy place” and humanity’s first “cathedral on a hill.” When it was constructed and in use, Göbekli was like “paradise” and much different from what it is today (after 10,000 years of settlement and farming):

Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn…“From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view. They’re looking out over a hunter’s dream.”

Visions like these were the apparent impetus for Spiegel’s cover story suggesting that Göbekli may have been the mythical “Garden of Eden.” Perhaps most surprising were Ian Hodder’s comments on Göbekli’s significance: “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later. You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.” Hodder is the Stanford based archaeologist who is excavating Çatalhöyük, another famously important Neolithic site in Turkey.

Also in 2008, Science covered Göbekli in “Seeking The Roots of Ritual.” This article best sums up the claims being made by Schmidt:

Schmidt insists this was no settlement. He’s convinced that the circles were designed to be open to the sky, like Stonehenge. Telltale signs of settlement—such as hearths, trash pits, and small fertility figurines—are conspicuously absent. And the hilltop is a long hike from any water sources.

“We know what settlements from these times look like,” Schmidt says. “This isn’t one of them.” Instead, Schmidt argues that hunter-gatherers from across the region gathered here periodically, pooled their resources temporarily to build the monuments for some ritual purpose, and then left.

Schmidt argues that the site’s antiquity and the lack of domesticated animal and plant remains is strong circumstantial evidence that symbolism and religion led to agriculture and domestication, not the other way around.

“Developing from hunter-gatherers to farmers happened here and spread south,” Schmidt says. “Not just architecture and monumental architecture, but turning wild animals into domestic livestock happened here. This is the starting point for a whole front of innovation.”

Ian Hodder appears to agree and comments that elaborated symbols and ideas came first, and the domestication of plants-animals followed. Religion, in other words, supposedly spurred the Neolithic Revolution and “civilization.”

These are extraordinary claims that have been challenged. In coming posts, we will look at Schmidt’s professional publications and recent reactions to them.

• Göbekli was built and used by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary agriculturalists.
• It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
• The massive stone structures or megaliths were “temples” or world’s earliest “churches.”
• It shows that complex organized religion preceded the domestication of plants and animals or Neolithic Revolution.

Why are these extraordinary claims? Because hunter-gatherers aren’t supposed to be doing these things and the order is wrong.

Before Göbekli, the consensus was that the domestication of the plants-animals was a condition precedent to the construction of megaliths and organized worship. After Göbekli, the causal arrows were supposedly reversed. If correct, this is heady stuff: it would mean that ideas and symbols led to or caused the single most important change in the history of humanity. There is no “civilization” without agriculture or food production.

Under the Göbekli scenario proposed by Schmidt and others, religion is not mere superstructure: it is base.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which Göbekli supposedly provides. But does it? In the October 2011 issue of Current Anthropology, University of Toronto archaeologist Edward Banning challenges the Göbekli claims. Banning’s article raises important questions about what has been found and how it has been interpreted.

Because the Göbekli claims and counterclaims are foundational, I will be covering them in a series of posts. In the first, we will look at the site itself and the extensive (sometimes sensational) press coverage, including interviews with Klaus Schmidt. In the second, we will examine Schmidt’s professional publications and site reports for Göbekli. In the third, we will look at the questions raised by Banning in “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East.” Finally, we will assess the whole to determine whether the extraordinary Göbekli claims are supported by sufficient evidence.

Although Göbekli surely is not (as Spiegel suggested in a 2006 cover story) the lost Garden of Eden, its archaeological and historical importance is undeniable. By the end of the series, we should have a better fix on Göbekli and the claims surrounding it. Is Göbekli an archaeological or metaphorical Stairway to Heaven? I kid but watch the video anyway.

Reference:

Banning, E.B. (2011). So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East Current Anthropology, 52 (5), 619-660 DOI: 10.1086/661207