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
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 labs around the world, researchers interested in the “evolution of religion” or cognitive science of religion are conducting experiments that tell us something about how supernatural beliefs initially may have arisen and subsequently been the target of selection. While we are accumulating lots of interesting data and the results are revealing, these studies will [...]
Tags:Apsaroke·burials·Bushmen·David Lewis-Williams·entoptics·ethnography·ethnohistory·Hadza·Harvard Kalahari Project·John H. Moore·neolithic·Paleolithic·Robert Lowie·San·The Cheyenne·The Crow Indians
In many books and articles addressing the origins of “religious” behavior, one will find the assertion that deliberate burials are indicative of soul beliefs and that because people began burying the dead approximately 100,000 years ago, this marks the beginning of what we today call religion. As I noted in this post, there are several [...]
Tags:afterlife·afterlife beliefs·burials·commonsense dualism·deliberate burials·fox·foxes·funerary·grave goods·guardian spirit·Jordan·Levant·Lisa Maher·mortuary·Native Americans·Natufian·pre-Natufian·Russia·social complexity·social organization·soul·spirit·Sunghir·Sungir·Upper Paleolithic·Uyun al-Hammam·vision·vision quest
Humans have been engaging with the supernatural for at least 50,000 years and perhaps much longer. Because humans have been writing for less than 5,000 years, this means that some 45,000 years of religious history reveals itself to us only through the archaeological record. For a long period of time, archaeologists were reluctant to investigate [...]
Tags:archaeology·burials·domestic·grave goods·Higgs·Jarman·monuments·neolithic·Richard Bradley·ritual·ritualization·sacred·shrines·soul·soul beliefs·writing
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the [...]
Tags:afterlife beliefs·Alexa Tullett·angst·anxiety·burials·Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right·distress·Do Hominid Burials Indicate a Belief in Spirits or Souls·effect of religiosity·Epiphenom·error reactions·fear·Future of An Illusion·grave goods·Homo neanderthalensis·Homo sapiens·Karl Marx·life after death·Michael Inzlicht·mortuary practices·Neanderthals·opiate·opium·proto-religion·received wisdom·Reflecting on God·Rhawn Joseph·Sigmund Freud·theism·Transmitter to God
Over at HuffPo Religion, Wray Herbert asks whether religious belief soothes the worried mind and reports on some new research suggesting it does. Scholars have been asking this question for quite a long time, and many have simply assumed that religion does in fact sooth troubled minds. Freud reached this conclusion in Future of an [...]
Tags:Alexa Tullett·anxiety·burials·calming effects·deliberate burials·explanation·Freud·Future of An Illusion·hominids·Michael Inzlicht·Neanderthals·order·parsimony·Pascal Boyer·purpose·Reflecting on God·Scott Atran·souls·spirits·Wray Herbert
In light of yesterday’s post regarding the widespread and naturally explicable belief that humans have spirits or souls, I thought it would be appropriate to continue on a related topic. It is often claimed, by enthusiastic archaeologists and anthropologists, that deliberate burial of the dead is a symbolic practice related to belief in the spirit [...]
Tags:burials·burying the dead·cult of the dead·deliberate burials·grave goods·hominids·Homo neanderthalensis·Homo sapiens·hygienic burial·Kebara·modern behavior·mortuary practices·Paleolithic religion·parsimony·Qafzeh·ritualized burial·Robert Gargett·Sally Binford·Shanidar·soul·spirit·symbolic thinking·taphonomy
