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This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortifie
by hetman 8y ago
This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors.
Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on display. She explained that for a very long time it had been believed it was used for offerings as part of religious ceremonies. Only when she first began working there as a student this struck her as odd since she remembered her grandma had used an almost identical vessel for kneading dough for bread. Needless to say, its purpose has since been relabeled.
Her observation to me was that in archaeology, any time researchers are uncertain of the purpose of an object they tend to ascribe a religious meaning to it and so any time an object is described as having a religious significance one should always take that assessment with a grain of salt.
- crooked-v 8y ago> any time researchers are uncertain of the purpose of an object they tend to ascribe a religious meaning to it https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoUnless they're biologists. Then it's for mating displays.
- tzs 8y agoWith non-human animals, though, aren't there much fewer possibilities than with humans? Most animals don't have the kind of food surpluses humans have, and so have can't afford to spend energy on things that aren't hunting or gathering food, fighting over territory, or reproducing. So if an animal is doing something prominently that isn't hunting or fighting or mating or raising young and others are watching but not getting upset by it, mating display is probably a reasonably safe assumption.
- yellowbuilding 8y agoOn this note, a vast amount of human energy (surplus and sometimes not, in the aggregate) can be understood as mating displays. Of course, we have added gender to the equation, which complicated things quite a bit.
- usrusr 8y agoThe means easily becomes the goal for us. Is a dysfunctional mating display still a mating display?
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI'm not sure what the "gender" part of your comment refers to? In the animal world it's generally only animals of one gender (usually males) that engage in these displays.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoI was thinking of extinct animals. (Maybe I should have said "paleontologists".) Whenever there's a structure or physical feature in a fossil whose purpose we can't identify, the default assumption is "it was probably used for mating displays." Sometimes further study (or comparison to extant species) comes up with a more practical use later. It's all hypothetical, of course, but so is "religious purposes." :)
- 2arrs2ells 8y agoDavid Macaulay's "Motel of the Mysteries" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Mysteries https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Myst...) satirizes this bias, with archeologists from 4022 inspecting a modern day motel room and uncovering the "holy" toilet. It's a gem.
- m741 8y agoI've got to thank you for this suggestion. I read this maybe 20 years ago in middle school, the concept stuck with me ("everything is oriented to this big box in the largest room, clearly it's a holy space" - television) and spent years thinking about it and never able to figure out what book it was.
- bluntfang 8y agoWell how isn't it a holy space? What is religion but an avenue to impart morals and support to a community? Does TV not reach this goal, especially given shows like CSI/Law and Order which basically give the impression that the police/authority have god-like powers to solve crime, which is our societies codified morals? Shows like "Good Morning America" in which the hosts are our pastors giving us our daily dose of what to buy and which celebrities to pay attention to?
- dekhn 8y agohttps://i.stack.imgur.com/LKl5c.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/LKl5c.jpg one of my favorite books of all time.
- lsc 8y agoThank you so much! I remember reading this book during my childhood, but the title and author have been lost to me for like two and a half decades. I actively look for these books I remember little snatches of... I thought this one was a Stanislaw Lem book, and though I really, really enjoyed "Memoirs found in a bathtub" - but that wasn't this. The chant of "sanitized for your protection" during the ritual use of the toilet really sticks out in my childhood memory. I wonder if it will be as great, reading it as an adult?
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoSomewhat similarly there's a tendency to see items as "fixed" in time to when they were found. The archeologist was ranting about how there was this whole taxonomy of stone tools: handaxes, picks, scrapers, knives, etc. and that nowdays we think of those things as set items. They then picked up a wedge shaped chunk of stone used it as a hand axe for a few minutes, took a chunk that had cracked off it to use as a knife, smashed it again to make a scraping tool and on and on. I think it's just hard to understand how tools in the past were used.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoI don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. Most people have the attitude that an item has a purpose, and that this purpose is it's only sanctioned one, and you can't use the item for anything else. So instead of using an item for multiple purposes, they'll just keep buying the same thing with different labels ("food scissors", "paper scissors", "knife for X", "knife for Y", "knife for Z", ...). I doubt kids in the past would hear from their parents such bullshit like "you can't dice these eggs with this, it's for dicing onions", etc.
- ahje 8y agoI keep getting wierd looks when I do things with a regular utility knife instead of spending five minutes fetching "the right tool for the job". I bet the ancient ones had the same problem when someone used a small shard of rock for a job that a larger shard was clearly better suited for! ;)
- vmh1928 8y agoWho hasn't used a flat bladed screwdriver to pry open a can of paint, scrape crud off of a car part, lever apart two things after removing the bolt, as a chisel and then turned it around and used the handle as a hammer. In some areas of life, not much has changed.
- laumars 8y agoThat might be true for some people from wealthier regions but I'd be surprised if that were the case for people from poorer backgrounds - even in wealthier countries. Plus it's not as if we don't have a whole plethora of multi-purpose tools from Swiss army knives, to drills that can also be used as electronic screw drivers, and even hammers that have nail pulls on them. I suspect the reason most archaeological finds are attributed to a single purpose is a much simpler one: it can sometimes be hard to derive an accurate description for a lot of tools when you're only looking for a single use. Trying to find multiple uses is therefore going to be an order of magnitude harder. So you therefore go with the most easily identifiable use case.
- cannedslime 8y agoYour anecdote reminds me of the Roman Dodecahedron. I saw a video on here some years ago about it being a suprisingly good tool for knitting fingergloves. But the wikipedia page still says it is all but that.
- CaptainJustin 8y agoI have found the same. When a building's purpose is unknown it will usually get labelled a temple.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAnother confirmation for your archaeologist's observation: my mother studied archaeology & cultural studies, and she learned the same thing from her professors.
- TomK32 8y agoThe "religious" label has been a sort of running gag on Time Team. I really miss that show.
- danans 8y agoEven objects correctly identified as being used for religious rituals are often still derived from practical objects, whether cups, spoons, etc, or ritualized weapons. Few objects are purely religious in their derivation. Sometimes the distinction between ritual and practical use is absolute, i.e "the sacred chalice shall only be used for services", or sometimes sacred vs. profane is distinguished by timing, or the incanting of particular verses. In general, we have an overly dualistic view ("it is one or the other") of of the sacred and profane as pertains to ancient objects, perhaps influenced by the dualities pervasive in Western philosophical systems.
- ryanmercer 8y agoI've always been curious how many items thought to have religious or societal significance are more in reality "yeah that's a backscratcher, yeah that's a dildo, yeah that's the equivalent of the 7th grade shop ceramics project that ancient Emo-Grok made, yeah that's just a random rock a bored prisoner carved as he slipped into madness".