22 ms·

>Crystals found across the planet and from several time periods have previously been linked to humans' spiritual belief and ritual. This includes in southern Af

by simias 6y ago

>Crystals found across the planet and from several time periods have previously been linked to humans' spiritual belief and ritual. This includes in southern Africa. Couldn't they just have been collected because they looked nice? When I was a kid I had a stash of more or less interesting rocks I found here and there. It seems weird to me to go straight for the spiritual and ritual explanation. >Many who visit Ga-Mohana Hill today for ritual practice see it as part of a network of places linked to the Great Water Snake (Nnoga ya metsi), a capricious and shape-shifting being. Many of these spiritual places are also associated with water. >Places such as Ga-Mohana Hill and their associated stories remain some of the most enduring intangible cultural artefacts from the past, linking modern indigenous South Africans to earlier communities. Is the article positing that (relatively) modern practices and beliefs could have a link to these 100+ millennia old crystals? If true it would be fascinating, but it seems like a pretty wild conjecture to me. The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. It seems to me that you'd have to have pretty convincing evidence to be able to extrapolate that far into the past.

prestonbriggs 6y ago
Then again, crows collect shiny things too.
- pmayrgundter 6y ago
  And bower birds!
currymj 6y ago
it's hard to say. there are indigenous Australian stories that have been preserved over 10,000 years that apparently have an accurate correspondence to the geological changes that took place over that time period. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-... 100,000 years does seem like a really long time though for a direct connection to present-day people.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Gutenberg changed our social structures and mental practices enormously. His presses lead to an explosion of protestantism, colonialism, slavery, and ultimately democracy. More than that, it begat the widespread practice of scientific research, which requires the examination and cultural transmission of quantitative information in fine grained contexts. We take Gutenberg's disruption for granted now, but it's a recent event. For millennia before Gutenberg, history and culture were transmitted orally. Amazingly, we don't have any appreciation for how that was done, except when we see something on television that we can't explain. Have you ever seen a memory champion memorise the order of two decks of cards in less than two minutes? How about the names of two dozen people from the audience in less than a minute, recalled perfectly at the end of the show? If so, you have glimpsed the technique that homo sapiens relied on for millennia. Did you know it's possible for you to remember lists of thousands of detailed facts and stories, even if you don't consider that your memory is anything special? The reason you don't do this is that (a) you don't need to do it because you have a laptop and a phone; and (b) you never learned how. But the Greeks and the Romans did it, and every culture before them. If they hadn't done it, you wouldn't have a laptop or a phone because you'd still be living on the savanna or in a cave. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Art_Of_Memory/bHeVn9BkUFwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Art_Of_Memory/bH...
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I really doubt that you could associate the printing press with an "explosion in slavery" given the history of the classical world.
    - eloff 6y ago
      What would be the causal link between the printing press and slavery? If anything it seems like they're just concurrent happenings in history. Maybe a slippery slope style of argument where printing press led to X which led to Y, which opened the new world, which led to plantations, which led to slavery. The problem with that is you can start at anything and end up there. The wheel. The loom. I could probably spin a convincing yarn starting from beer.
thrower123 6y ago
Spiritual and ritual purposes is the automatic answer any time archaeologists find something they can't easily explain in an better way.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Isn't that because spiritual and ritual practices are culturally pervasive, particularly among non-modern peoples?
  - thrower123 6y ago
    No, it's really just that they have no fucking idea what they are looking at, so they say it's religion. My favorite one is how archaeologists identified hundreds of structures, all around the Mediterranean, and declared that they were religious shrines. Turns out that they were actually olive oil presses.
    - datavirtue 6y ago
      This. Concluding that something was for ritual purposes always gets an eye roll from me. Some kids pet rock from 11k years ago? Definitely an idol. A snazzy knife? Used in religious rites. What the serious fuck is up with the obsession of attributing religious significance to everything belonging to an ancient? Growing up I was taken aback that archeologists got to write the history on top of specializing in identifying and excavating sites. Just dig the shit up, record the facts and let everyone think for themselves.
      - AlotOfReading 6y ago
        It's because the words 'ritual' and 'religious' aren't necessarily used in the way the public conceives of these terms. I've surveyed plenty of burials which I could plausibly describe as ritual in nature. That doesn't mean people were worshipping the person/people buried there, but it does mean I think that they were making deliberate, sequenced actions to accomplish a purpose and that these steps that were culturally sanctioned/regulated. Secondly, the division you think should exist already does. Not all archaeologists are there digging in the dirt. Depending on the nature of the site and the area, it may even be uncommon. But here's how a typical dig site functions: the lead archaeologist/excavation director is rarely on site to dig. They're doing other things. The site supervisor/crew chief (another archeologist) manages the site day to day and does lots of paperwork, directs everyone, handles visitors, and secondarily inspects finds. These two people in consultation with others produce almost all the interpretations you dislike. Below them there will typically be some number of other archaeologists, specialists, and grad students, who may dig, but often do other things surrounding the actual digging like flotation, taking coordinates, or managing finds. At the bottom are undergrads and local workers who do most of the actual digging and other manual labor. These are rarely involved in interpretation beyond recognizing artifacts, they purely "record the facts". The laborers in particular tend to specialize in excavation. It's a point of pride to many of them that they're better excavators than most archaeologists.
sillyquiet 6y ago
I keep saying, popular reporting of archeological and other pre-historic finds is particularly bad in a sea of bad science reporting, probably because of the rampant speculation and romanticism associated with such things.
- billfruit 6y ago
  Doesn't journalism school focus on preventing such bad tendencies. There is almost a regularity of pattern by which journalists seem to represent or rather misrepresent.
  - kleer001 6y ago
    Not to insult either discipline, but I bet the crossover of trained anthropologists and trained journalists is smaller than either one on their own.
wombatmobile 6y ago
> The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. How so? Our biology is virtually identical. Our emotional, physical and spiritual needs haven't changed, have they? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "our culture", but if we assume some kind of Californian derivative, the most obvious difference is our built environment, which features more shopping malls, office towers, airports, highways and hospitals than Ga-Mohana. And more obesity. More guns too, but they had weapons and laws for the same reasons we do, didn't they? What do you imagine are the differences between our culture, language and customs vis a vis people of 100k years ago?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  The unstated (and pretty obviously wrong) premise in your comment is that culture is somehow deterministically derived from biology.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    "Determines" is too strong a word, since all human cultures are different - more different than our biology would suggest, but probably no more different than our respective micro-climates and natural resource distributions. What would you say culture is, and what determines it?
- burnished 6y ago
  Are you serious?
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    I'm curious! Did your mother, grandmother, or spouse collect crystals? Many humans - perhaps most - keep at least one crystal attached to a finger. Why is that?
    - ArnoVW 6y ago
      In terms of wedding rings, that's not a fundamental human value, but simply because De Beers launched a campaign that still today is a school case for advertising, due to it's ROI. "In 1938, the diamond cartel De Beers began a marketing campaign that would have a major impact on engagement rings. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the price of diamonds collapsed.[25] At the same time, market research indicated that engagement rings were going out of style with the younger generation. Before World War II, only 10% of American engagement rings contained a diamond." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring
BitwiseFool 6y ago
You would enjoy "Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay. Basically, a future archeologist discovers a buried motel room and begins speculating about it's true purpose. "judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  In a similar vein is "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...)
  - nemosaltat 6y ago
    I was introduced to this in SOC101 by one of the best professors I ever had. It was given as a paper handout and we were instructed to read and discuss. A couple students caught on, but I wasn’t one of them and it made it so much better. Over a decade later when I find myself attempting to fit a new concept into my own, limited, world view, the Holy Mouth Men still come to warn me.
- robotastronaut 6y ago
  Holy cow this is the first time I've thought of this since I was a kid! My favorite was the toilet seat being headwear and "sanitized for your protection" as a chant. Probably why I became an archaeologist.
  - russfink 6y ago
    I remember an excerpt of tbat in Reader's Digest. They posited that tbe bath/plumbing fixtures were for making sacred music, IIRC.
  - 6y ago
AlotOfReading 6y ago
Anthropologists and archaeologists abuse the word "ritual" and it confuses the heck out of journalists and laypeople. In the broadest usage, it's just a series of specific actions that are a "thing". For instance, this clip from The Grinch shows a completely non-religious ritual [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNohsJhgCPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNohsJhgCPU
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Speaking of The Grinch and religion, I often wonder about the basis of Whoville's celebration of Christmas. Did the Whos have their own version of Jesus - perhaps also known by His birth name of Jeswhoa? Was He the king of the Whos? Did He die for the forgiveness of the Whos' sins, after leading a ministry among the peoples of Whodea?
OnlyMortal 6y ago
The use of “religion” is when archaeologists don’t know why.
ctoth 6y ago
"Beyond doubt, while errors are sometimes made in archeology, this is one case in which no chance of error exists. The statues are clearly religious in significance. With that sure footing on which to rest the careful scientist may deduce with assurance the purpose of..." Here's a fun little short story from Robert Heinlein that makes quite a bit of fun of this idea. http://nemaloknig.net/read-121683/ http://nemaloknig.net/read-121683/
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Archeologists joke that if modern sport arenas were abandoned now a d rediscovered in 5000 years, archeologists and historians of the future would have theories that these structures were used for religious rituals that involved thousands of people, and sports merchandise would be interpreted as cult objects.
- COGlory 6y ago
  In some senses that's not an inaccurate interpretation. Religion means a lot of very different things to different people.
- hinoki 6y ago
  Or politics, like the greens vs the blues in the eastern Roman Empire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
rukuu001 6y ago
I heard a great interview with an anthropologist (no reference sorry), who said always be suspicious of objects in museums labeled ‘for ritual’, because that’s the anthropological fallback for ‘no obvious purpose’ Edit: spelling
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  this. Archeologists label things as being "for ritual purposes" when they can't immediately identify a practical purpose. Which would be OK if archeologists were trained in any of the hundreds of specialised activities needed to stay alive in pre-industrial times. But no. Digging precise holes in a grid, and drawing. I'm only being a bit cynical.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    People who don't deal with archaeologists or the like may not get the humor here. It's super common for people in these fields to have historical hobbies on the side. Knapping and garments are common, but I've known people who do things like persistence hunting for fun. I spent awhile learning how to process animals myself.
BurningFrog 6y ago
One possible angle is that before the Age Of Science, pretty much everything was seen as controlled by good and spirits. Which makes everything have a partial religious purpose.

by simias 6y ago

prestonbriggs 6y ago

Then again, crows collect shiny things too.

pmayrgundter 6y ago
And bower birds!

currymj 6y ago

it's hard to say. there are indigenous Australian stories that have been preserved over 10,000 years that apparently have an accurate correspondence to the geological changes that took place over that time period. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-... 100,000 years does seem like a really long time though for a direct connection to present-day people.

wombatmobile 6y ago
Gutenberg changed our social structures and mental practices enormously. His presses lead to an explosion of protestantism, colonialism, slavery, and ultimately democracy. More than that, it begat the widespread practice of scientific research, which requires the examination and cultural transmission of quantitative information in fine grained contexts. We take Gutenberg's disruption for granted now, but it's a recent event. For millennia before Gutenberg, history and culture were transmitted orally. Amazingly, we don't have any appreciation for how that was done, except when we see something on television that we can't explain. Have you ever seen a memory champion memorise the order of two decks of cards in less than two minutes? How about the names of two dozen people from the audience in less than a minute, recalled perfectly at the end of the show? If so, you have glimpsed the technique that homo sapiens relied on for millennia. Did you know it's possible for you to remember lists of thousands of detailed facts and stories, even if you don't consider that your memory is anything special? The reason you don't do this is that (a) you don't need to do it because you have a laptop and a phone; and (b) you never learned how. But the Greeks and the Romans did it, and every culture before them. If they hadn't done it, you wouldn't have a laptop or a phone because you'd still be living on the savanna or in a cave. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Art_Of_Memory/bHeVn9BkUFwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Art_Of_Memory/bH...
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I really doubt that you could associate the printing press with an "explosion in slavery" given the history of the classical world.
  - eloff 6y ago
    What would be the causal link between the printing press and slavery? If anything it seems like they're just concurrent happenings in history. Maybe a slippery slope style of argument where printing press led to X which led to Y, which opened the new world, which led to plantations, which led to slavery. The problem with that is you can start at anything and end up there. The wheel. The loom. I could probably spin a convincing yarn starting from beer.

thrower123 6y ago

Spiritual and ritual purposes is the automatic answer any time archaeologists find something they can't easily explain in an better way.

dr_dshiv 6y ago
Isn't that because spiritual and ritual practices are culturally pervasive, particularly among non-modern peoples?
- thrower123 6y ago
  No, it's really just that they have no fucking idea what they are looking at, so they say it's religion. My favorite one is how archaeologists identified hundreds of structures, all around the Mediterranean, and declared that they were religious shrines. Turns out that they were actually olive oil presses.
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    This. Concluding that something was for ritual purposes always gets an eye roll from me. Some kids pet rock from 11k years ago? Definitely an idol. A snazzy knife? Used in religious rites. What the serious fuck is up with the obsession of attributing religious significance to everything belonging to an ancient? Growing up I was taken aback that archeologists got to write the history on top of specializing in identifying and excavating sites. Just dig the shit up, record the facts and let everyone think for themselves.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      It's because the words 'ritual' and 'religious' aren't necessarily used in the way the public conceives of these terms. I've surveyed plenty of burials which I could plausibly describe as ritual in nature. That doesn't mean people were worshipping the person/people buried there, but it does mean I think that they were making deliberate, sequenced actions to accomplish a purpose and that these steps that were culturally sanctioned/regulated. Secondly, the division you think should exist already does. Not all archaeologists are there digging in the dirt. Depending on the nature of the site and the area, it may even be uncommon. But here's how a typical dig site functions: the lead archaeologist/excavation director is rarely on site to dig. They're doing other things. The site supervisor/crew chief (another archeologist) manages the site day to day and does lots of paperwork, directs everyone, handles visitors, and secondarily inspects finds. These two people in consultation with others produce almost all the interpretations you dislike. Below them there will typically be some number of other archaeologists, specialists, and grad students, who may dig, but often do other things surrounding the actual digging like flotation, taking coordinates, or managing finds. At the bottom are undergrads and local workers who do most of the actual digging and other manual labor. These are rarely involved in interpretation beyond recognizing artifacts, they purely "record the facts". The laborers in particular tend to specialize in excavation. It's a point of pride to many of them that they're better excavators than most archaeologists.

sillyquiet 6y ago

I keep saying, popular reporting of archeological and other pre-historic finds is particularly bad in a sea of bad science reporting, probably because of the rampant speculation and romanticism associated with such things.

billfruit 6y ago
Doesn't journalism school focus on preventing such bad tendencies. There is almost a regularity of pattern by which journalists seem to represent or rather misrepresent.
- kleer001 6y ago
  Not to insult either discipline, but I bet the crossover of trained anthropologists and trained journalists is smaller than either one on their own.

wombatmobile 6y ago

> The culture, language and customs of people 100k years ago was probably very different from ours. How so? Our biology is virtually identical. Our emotional, physical and spiritual needs haven't changed, have they? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "our culture", but if we assume some kind of Californian derivative, the most obvious difference is our built environment, which features more shopping malls, office towers, airports, highways and hospitals than Ga-Mohana. And more obesity. More guns too, but they had weapons and laws for the same reasons we do, didn't they? What do you imagine are the differences between our culture, language and customs vis a vis people of 100k years ago?

whimsicalism 6y ago
The unstated (and pretty obviously wrong) premise in your comment is that culture is somehow deterministically derived from biology.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  "Determines" is too strong a word, since all human cultures are different - more different than our biology would suggest, but probably no more different than our respective micro-climates and natural resource distributions. What would you say culture is, and what determines it?
burnished 6y ago
Are you serious?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  I'm curious! Did your mother, grandmother, or spouse collect crystals? Many humans - perhaps most - keep at least one crystal attached to a finger. Why is that?
  - ArnoVW 6y ago
    In terms of wedding rings, that's not a fundamental human value, but simply because De Beers launched a campaign that still today is a school case for advertising, due to it's ROI. "In 1938, the diamond cartel De Beers began a marketing campaign that would have a major impact on engagement rings. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the price of diamonds collapsed.[25] At the same time, market research indicated that engagement rings were going out of style with the younger generation. Before World War II, only 10% of American engagement rings contained a diamond." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_ring

BitwiseFool 6y ago

You would enjoy "Motel of the Mysteries" by David Macaulay. Basically, a future archeologist discovers a buried motel room and begins speculating about it's true purpose. "judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."

Rebelgecko 6y ago
In a similar vein is "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...)
- nemosaltat 6y ago
  I was introduced to this in SOC101 by one of the best professors I ever had. It was given as a paper handout and we were instructed to read and discuss. A couple students caught on, but I wasn’t one of them and it made it so much better. Over a decade later when I find myself attempting to fit a new concept into my own, limited, world view, the Holy Mouth Men still come to warn me.
robotastronaut 6y ago
Holy cow this is the first time I've thought of this since I was a kid! My favorite was the toilet seat being headwear and "sanitized for your protection" as a chant. Probably why I became an archaeologist.
- russfink 6y ago
  I remember an excerpt of tbat in Reader's Digest. They posited that tbe bath/plumbing fixtures were for making sacred music, IIRC.
- 6y ago

AlotOfReading 6y ago

Anthropologists and archaeologists abuse the word "ritual" and it confuses the heck out of journalists and laypeople. In the broadest usage, it's just a series of specific actions that are a "thing". For instance, this clip from The Grinch shows a completely non-religious ritual [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNohsJhgCPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNohsJhgCPU

yellowapple 6y ago
Speaking of The Grinch and religion, I often wonder about the basis of Whoville's celebration of Christmas. Did the Whos have their own version of Jesus - perhaps also known by His birth name of Jeswhoa? Was He the king of the Whos? Did He die for the forgiveness of the Whos' sins, after leading a ministry among the peoples of Whodea?

OnlyMortal 6y ago

The use of “religion” is when archaeologists don’t know why.

ctoth 6y ago

"Beyond doubt, while errors are sometimes made in archeology, this is one case in which no chance of error exists. The statues are clearly religious in significance. With that sure footing on which to rest the careful scientist may deduce with assurance the purpose of..." Here's a fun little short story from Robert Heinlein that makes quite a bit of fun of this idea. http://nemaloknig.net/read-121683/ http://nemaloknig.net/read-121683/

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

Archeologists joke that if modern sport arenas were abandoned now a d rediscovered in 5000 years, archeologists and historians of the future would have theories that these structures were used for religious rituals that involved thousands of people, and sports merchandise would be interpreted as cult objects.

COGlory 6y ago
In some senses that's not an inaccurate interpretation. Religion means a lot of very different things to different people.
hinoki 6y ago
Or politics, like the greens vs the blues in the eastern Roman Empire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots

rukuu001 6y ago

I heard a great interview with an anthropologist (no reference sorry), who said always be suspicious of objects in museums labeled ‘for ritual’, because that’s the anthropological fallback for ‘no obvious purpose’ Edit: spelling

marcus_holmes 6y ago
this. Archeologists label things as being "for ritual purposes" when they can't immediately identify a practical purpose. Which would be OK if archeologists were trained in any of the hundreds of specialised activities needed to stay alive in pre-industrial times. But no. Digging precise holes in a grid, and drawing. I'm only being a bit cynical.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  People who don't deal with archaeologists or the like may not get the humor here. It's super common for people in these fields to have historical hobbies on the side. Knapping and garments are common, but I've known people who do things like persistence hunting for fun. I spent awhile learning how to process animals myself.

BurningFrog 6y ago

One possible angle is that before the Age Of Science, pretty much everything was seen as controlled by good and spirits. Which makes everything have a partial religious purpose.