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
Having just finished Robert Lowie’s classic Indians of the Plains (1954), I thought it appropriate to comment briefly on chapter six, which is titled “Supernaturalism.”
Lowie begins by noting that Indians did not recognize the physical/metaphysical dichotomy that characterizes Western thought, but they “can and did react vehemently to perceptions that are wholly out of the [...]
Tags:Ake Hultkrantz·Apsaroke·Crow·ethnohistory·Indians·Indians of the Plains·Lakota·manitou·maxpe·Plains Indians·Raymond DeMallie·Robert Lowie·Sioux·supernaturalism·wakan·Winnebago
There have been many articles over the past week reporting that an unusually large group (150 members) of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda has been engaging in systematic territorial expansion by attacking and killing neighboring groups. The Nature article notes that this is “cooperative behavior” and then quotes from the New York Times story:
These [...]
Tags:aggression·Blackfoot·Cheyenne·chimpanzees·chimps·city-states·cohesion·Comanche·cooperation·Cree·Crow·David Sloan Wilson·ecology·Egypt·Flathead·foragers·Gros Ventre·group level selection·Kibale National Park·kinship·Kiowa·Lakota·Levant·Matt Rossano·Mesopotamia·Nicholas Wade·Plains Indians·power·religion·religious warfare·Sarsi·shamans·Shoshoni·territoriality·The Faith Instinct·war
To learn more about the Native American Ghost Dance movement and the conflagration at Wounded Knee in 1890, over the weekend I read Rex Alan Smith’s Moon of the Popping Trees: The Tragedy at Wounded Knee and the End of the Indian Wars. Smith has constructed a crisp narrative that will hold your attention.
For those [...]
Tags:apocalyptic·battle·Big Foot·eschatological·eschatology·Ghost Dance·Lakota·massacre·millenarian·Moon of the Popping Trees·Paiute shaman·Rex Alan Smith·Wounded Knee·Wovoka
By my reading of history, the turning (or tipping) point for humanity was the domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as the Neolithic Revolution. Before this occurred — at different places in the world at different times, beginning approximately 12,000 years ago and largely the dominant mode of production by 5,000 years ago — [...]
Tags:agriculture·civilization·demography·disease·domestication of plants and animals·environmental destruction·foragers·hunter-gatherers·Lakota·Marshall Sahlins·Native Americans·Neolithic Revolution·Original Affluent Society·Paleoterrific·Pandora's Seed·Paul Rincon·population explosion·sedentism·sickness·specialization·Spencer Wells·Stone Age Economics·stratification·surplus
Because most modern religions are constructed around — and concern themselves with — moral or ethical behavior, the common (and mistaken) assumption is that morality and religion are inextricably linked and have always been linked. This simply is not the case. As I discussed in this post, there are many societies — past and present [...]
Tags:ethics·Hammurabi·Lakota·Luther Standing Bear·morality·morals·Phillip Goldberg·prosical·Rig Veda·Sam Harris·Sumerians·Ten Commandments·the Lakota way
Over at Inkling Magazine, Meera Lee Sethi reports on a brilliant study which shows that when believers are told that the person to whom they are listening has divine powers, the regions of their brain responsible for high level executive functioning — in other words, the areas involved in critical thinking and judgment — show [...]
Tags:faith healing·hypnosis·James McClenon·James Walker·Lakota·placebo·priming·shamanic healing·suggestibility·suspension of disbelief·wicasa wakan
One of the dilemmas I faced when creating this blog was deciding what to call it. Although I eventually settled on the word “Religion” rather than “Metaphysics,” this decision was not easy. Why?
The concept of “religion” is Western and recent. Simply having a category called “religion” implies there is something — a set of practices, [...]
For those interested in the lucrative and ludicrous commercialization of Native American spiritual traditions, I highly recommend Lisa Aldred’s article “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances,” which you can find here. With a nod to David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, she notes:
In the so-called postmodern culture of late consumer capitalism, a significant number of white [...]
