Death is big business. This past year, Americans spent $15 billion on funeral related expenses. Americans are not outliers when it comes to death spending; funeral related expenditures around the world are estimated to be at least this much and probably more. Strangely, the ratio of death spending does not diminish in poorer countries. In [...]
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This past week, British newspapers carried sensational headlines about an archaeological find in Prague: “First Homosexual Caveman Found” (The Telegraph) and “Oldest Gay in the Village: 5,000 Year Old is ‘Outed’ By the Way He Was Buried” (Daily Mail). Although the assemblage in question has not been published in a journal, the archaeologists called a [...]
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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 [...]
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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
The story is familiar and follows a similar trajectory wherever people have made the transition from foraging to agriculture: surpluses enable social stratification that is legitimized as part of the ritual order. Elites claim the cosmological sanction of the supernatural.
In a recent study of mortuary practices at Chaco Canyon that appears in PNAS, Stephen Plog [...]
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This is really cool — an elderly woman buried in the Levant 12,000 years ago with a plethora of grave goods and indications of a feast for her send off. As reported by Live Science, this was a critical transitional period from foraging to agriculture:
Prehistoric leftovers of a feast 12,000 years ago at an apparent [...]
Tags:feast ritual·grave goods·Levant·mortuary practices·neolithic·ritual·shaman
Archaeologists working in Europe have it good, really good. Depending on one’s interests, you can research just about anything. Paleoanthropologists can work on hominid evolution (i.e., Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, H. neanderthalensis), while their colleagues can study a host of fascinating subjects, including the Upper Paleolithic transition, mesolithic hunter-gatherers, incipient agriculturalists, and the usual smattering [...]
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“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
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
