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Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and ritual? It's like it's to put some ki

Knowing little about this, I wonder would it change how we thought about these if we didn't call everything ceremonial and ritual? It's like it's to put some kind of figleaf over these people other people who were probably a lot like us. I suppose my reaction is that popular archeological articles seem to effectively defy economics as a force in their explanations, and seem to prefer treating the cultures as being under an impaired superstition about the world. It seems like uncovering a stadium, airport, or the Washington Mall from our world today and saying it was for rituals and ceremonies, which sure, abstractly it is, but it seems a bit filtered through a lens of studying them as primitive pagans. Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic. If you start with the loop of necessity that nothing is ever more than it needs to be, we can bootstrap the question of for what was this necessary? It's even more plausible to say pyramids were the product of a policy of Ancient Keynesianism, than to treat megalithic builders as primitive. Maybe I'm just as curious as archeologists are, but if we applied how mystified some modern academics can seem about trade and economics today and then apply that back to studying ancient cultures, I'd wonder if there were some opportunities to reduce some blind spots.

andrewflnr 5y ago
While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important. If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >Think about all the huge temples ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.
- ultimape 5y ago
  I found a bunch of churches were built on ground that has been shown to contain soil bacteria with anti-biofilm properties. This means the 'holy ground' was literally able to heal wounds. Likewise, a lot of 'holy water' has similar healing properties because it often contained gold and silver nanoparticles. The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.
- erikpukinskis 5y ago
  What’s a little odd to me is we don’t call it “rituals” when applied to modern people, we call it “religious services”. “Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are religious in nature.
  - andnasnd 5y ago
    I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they are delineated in an anthropological context. For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society. I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible explanation for these kinds of things.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  It's not a putdown at all, other than perhaps to a modern intelligentsia who would see, say, the NFL as a ritual instead of a complex economic organization, of which what we perceive externally as ritual is the least meaningful explanation for a vast economic machine. Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven by economics and power, and churches established territory, merely under the convenience of state religion. When you design any structure, form follows function, and function follows economy, which in turn has necessary conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring, what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises, credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is the expression of all of it. When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems, or using geometry to engineer things. These were human civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them faster if we didn't start with the premise they were superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure, if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing rituals.
  - andrewflnr 5y ago
    Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions, almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't treat the ritual separate from its practical implications, because in the minds of people they derive from the same logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at scale apparently takes centuries at best. I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away. As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
FWIW, a lot of our structures are basically for rituals. Large stadiums are for spectators to observe the best football players as part of yearly ceremonial games. Certain parks are for ceremonial gatherings on certain time of years, where we put traditional ritual ornaments (e.g.: christmas decoration). It's just the OUR rituals have names and we don't think of them as rituals, but we have plenty of things that are ritualistic and ceremonial: the olypmics, new year, halloween, easter, friday drinks at the office, birthday parties, etc.
- mro_name 5y ago
  and most datacenters are. A lot of accounting is. PR mostly is.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    yes, giant blocks of silicon to divine the future
- varelse 5y ago
  Indeed: the Nacirema are a strange people. https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...
  - manuel_w 5y ago
    The linked document has 5 (or six?) pages, would you mind to provide a short summary what to find there?
    - washadjeffmad 5y ago
      It's a very short text given to Anthro 1101 classes recounting objective observations about the titular 'daily rituals of the Nacirema', who by their descriptions must be a distant and alien people. At risk of spoiling, Nacirema backwards is 'American'.
kingkawn 5y ago
I think your associations with the word ritual are too limited. It isn’t just paganism, but all ceremonial behaviors that serve symbolic cultural functions. Stadiums included.
Izkata 5y ago
On this point: What they've uncovered here looks to me kinda like a jousting field [0]. The raised line in the center separates the running area of the two opponents' horses, though some of them are too far off-center and the hump next to the line would be a bit of a mystery. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting
d0mine 5y ago
"an impaired superstition about the world." it is still a pretty accurate description of the current affairs.
Haga 5y ago
But that's the running gag in archeology? If you don't know it's purpose it's for r&c
vram22 5y ago
>Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic. Sez who? Maybe just you. ;) Egyptian pyramids, for example. Ellora Caves, for another, at least for the "hundreds of tons of rock" part. I can mention more. And anyway, in ancient India, religion, astrology, rituals, sculpture, temple-building a.k.a. religious architecture, dance, music, song, even cooking / food, medicine and healing, were all interlinked and blended into one harmonious whole. Linked by a sort of analogue of the holy grail of physics, the grand unified theory of everything. I don't know if there is a specific single name for that or not, but I can mention many traditional terms that give clear pointers, if anyone is interested. Stonehenge, too. (Edited.)
HahaReally 5y ago
“Pagan” as a word is used to mean “non-Christian”, which in modern times, doesn’t really carry any weight in terms of what you’re saying about their practices. Christians are more than happy to insist they have some sort of religion that is “more advanced” while simultaneously being /historically recorded/ as having acted violent, cruel, callous, and superstitious to anything outside of what their parents and community told them was “religion”, and this only carries over to the printing press being used as the means by which to disseminate their poison. Your ideas of religion are backward and given to you by the sellers of poison for the soul.

andrewflnr 5y ago

While it's likely that not everything we label as "for ritual purposes" was exactly that, I think you're hugely underestimating the force of religion. Think about all the huge temples and cathedrals that have been built just in the western world. You don't think Mesoamericans felt the same impulse? "Seized by astrological magic" is framing the question with a putdown that distorts your understanding. You can't predict the actions of ancient people with a modern mindset about astrology in particular or religion in general. To them, these ideas were very real and important. If you read a tiny bit more broadly in pop archaeology, it's clear that they're trying their best to find economic reasons for things. It's a bit insulting to insinuate they jump straight to "ritual purposes" without considering more mundane reasons.

dylan604 5y ago
>Think about all the huge temples ancient temples. Modern temples look more like shopping malls or other large buildings than the ornate buildings of old.
ultimape 5y ago
I found a bunch of churches were built on ground that has been shown to contain soil bacteria with anti-biofilm properties. This means the 'holy ground' was literally able to heal wounds. Likewise, a lot of 'holy water' has similar healing properties because it often contained gold and silver nanoparticles. The ritual use of these sites usually occurred afterwards once economic situation and custom solidified it as an area of rulership. Often cargo-cult'ing what would have been a genuine healing process.
erikpukinskis 5y ago
What’s a little odd to me is we don’t call it “rituals” when applied to modern people, we call it “religious services”. “Rituals” does have a bit of a connotation beyond religion don’t you think?
- jhgb 5y ago
  Maybe that's the point. Unlike with today's people, you can't know for sure the intentions behind archeological finds. Calling something "ritualistic" in archeology seems more likely to be correct, as not all social rituals are religious in nature.
- andnasnd 5y ago
  I'm partially trained in anthropology and would love to provide some insight. While terms like 'ritual' and 'ceremonial' certainly indicate religious undertones, they are delineated in an anthropological context. For example, an anthro operational definition for 'ritual' would be "actions with intentional symbolic meaning undertaken for a specific cultural purpose", where the cultural purpose could be childhood development (rites of adulthood), religious as previously mentioned, or perhaps just a fun activity within the society. I say all of this but understand that this article isn't necessarily geared towards only anthropologists, and operational definitions may be in order. Just my 2cents
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Sure, we tend to forget that things like Independence Day fireworks are also modern rituals. I don't see how that's super relevant to my original point, though? Religion is not the only ritual system, but it does seem to be the one with the most consistent track record of inciting huge non-economically-motivated resource expenditures (at least superficially; the economic impact of social cohesion is one of small-change-in-the-exponent things that's easy to underestimate). Anyway, I really just wanted to push back on the idea that "ritual purposes" is an implausible explanation for these kinds of things.
motohagiography 5y ago
It's not a putdown at all, other than perhaps to a modern intelligentsia who would see, say, the NFL as a ritual instead of a complex economic organization, of which what we perceive externally as ritual is the least meaningful explanation for a vast economic machine. Cathedrals are another example, where the Catholic church was mainly a vast economic and political colonial machine driven by economics and power, and churches established territory, merely under the convenience of state religion. When you design any structure, form follows function, and function follows economy, which in turn has necessary conditions, like shortest distances, water, waste, an average 1500 kcal/person/day, security for families and offspring, what kind of costs to impose on invaders, a contract and accounting system for future delivery of goods and promises, credit for crops, tools for leverage, architecture that is the expression of all of it. When we say ritual now, it implies sympathetic magic. The scientific method is not a ritual, nor is proving theorems, or using geometry to engineer things. These were human civilizations and my point is we might learn more about them faster if we didn't start with the premise they were superstitious and lacked political and economic agency. Sure, if one thinks all religions are equally nonsensical and its role is at best a noble lie, then an ancient one might also be that, but if it's a way to encode and transmit knowledge robustly and sustainably in a culture, I'd argue they were probably more like us than we think when we say they're doing rituals.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Maybe we're mostly in agreement? I certainly agree that ancient people were very similar to us, and that religion can have value by transmitting knowledge. But religions, almost any social meme complex, tend to have a lot of nonsense closely entwined with the beneficial payload. So when people act it out as a whole, it can have some really goofy side effects, like cathedrals (the details of what's inside, if not the brute fact of its location). You can't treat the ritual separate from its practical implications, because in the minds of people they derive from the same logical source, and if you try to take just the parts you like you'll actually be acting inconsistently with your supposed beliefs. Separating the good from the bogus at scale apparently takes centuries at best. I guess maybe you're saying we should try harder to find the economic purposes under the apparently ritual artifacts? Maybe. I'm honestly pretty sure that's assumed in practice. I bet if you talked to an archaeologist on the project and raised a similar point to your point about cathedrals, they would say something like "Hmm? Yes, of course it was something like that." But even if we get enough evidence to figure out the economic or political role these sites played, my guess is the religious or other ritual aspects will not go away. As for our modern perspective, assuming that ancient people were superstitious is a completely natural extrapolation from watching ourselves, even if that's not where the assumption comes from in practice. Math is pretty solid, and the platonic ideal of science but science as practiced today too often is a ritual, or we wouldn't have all these replication crises and junk COVID papers.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

FWIW, a lot of our structures are basically for rituals. Large stadiums are for spectators to observe the best football players as part of yearly ceremonial games. Certain parks are for ceremonial gatherings on certain time of years, where we put traditional ritual ornaments (e.g.: christmas decoration). It's just the OUR rituals have names and we don't think of them as rituals, but we have plenty of things that are ritualistic and ceremonial: the olypmics, new year, halloween, easter, friday drinks at the office, birthday parties, etc.

mro_name 5y ago
and most datacenters are. A lot of accounting is. PR mostly is.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  yes, giant blocks of silicon to divine the future
varelse 5y ago
Indeed: the Nacirema are a strange people. https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacirema.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/Miner-1956-BodyRitualAmongTheNacir...
- manuel_w 5y ago
  The linked document has 5 (or six?) pages, would you mind to provide a short summary what to find there?
  - washadjeffmad 5y ago
    It's a very short text given to Anthro 1101 classes recounting objective observations about the titular 'daily rituals of the Nacirema', who by their descriptions must be a distant and alien people. At risk of spoiling, Nacirema backwards is 'American'.

kingkawn 5y ago

I think your associations with the word ritual are too limited. It isn’t just paganism, but all ceremonial behaviors that serve symbolic cultural functions. Stadiums included.

Izkata 5y ago

On this point: What they've uncovered here looks to me kinda like a jousting field [0]. The raised line in the center separates the running area of the two opponents' horses, though some of them are too far off-center and the hump next to the line would be a bit of a mystery. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jousting

d0mine 5y ago

"an impaired superstition about the world." it is still a pretty accurate description of the current affairs.

Haga 5y ago

But that's the running gag in archeology? If you don't know it's purpose it's for r&c

vram22 5y ago

>Nobody shifts hundreds of tons of rock for being seized by astrological magic. Sez who? Maybe just you. ;) Egyptian pyramids, for example. Ellora Caves, for another, at least for the "hundreds of tons of rock" part. I can mention more. And anyway, in ancient India, religion, astrology, rituals, sculpture, temple-building a.k.a. religious architecture, dance, music, song, even cooking / food, medicine and healing, were all interlinked and blended into one harmonious whole. Linked by a sort of analogue of the holy grail of physics, the grand unified theory of everything. I don't know if there is a specific single name for that or not, but I can mention many traditional terms that give clear pointers, if anyone is interested. Stonehenge, too. (Edited.)

HahaReally 5y ago

“Pagan” as a word is used to mean “non-Christian”, which in modern times, doesn’t really carry any weight in terms of what you’re saying about their practices. Christians are more than happy to insist they have some sort of religion that is “more advanced” while simultaneously being /historically recorded/ as having acted violent, cruel, callous, and superstitious to anything outside of what their parents and community told them was “religion”, and this only carries over to the printing press being used as the means by which to disseminate their poison. Your ideas of religion are backward and given to you by the sellers of poison for the soul.