8 ms·

Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?

• cdot2 3y ago
  Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
  • progre 3y ago
    Yeah, but humans do lots of stuff just for fun too. It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
    • secondcoming 3y ago
      I believe it's that fact that it has survived for so long that it may have been treated with greater care and build quality than an everyday item. Of course it could have been an everyday object.
• rippercushions 3y ago
  Everything new can get that stamp too: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...
  • progre 3y ago
    This is satire
• zitsarethecure 3y ago
  I once went to an Ohio State football pre-game show where the band played and they had the players march through into the main stadium. Everyone was wearing the team colors, every song they played had these hand gestures and words you had to do and say along with the music, and there were all sorts of odd seemingly out of nowhere cheers and exclamations by the fans, the players and the various highly dressed up musicians and officials. If an alien species came down and observed it, I would be surprised if they didn't say this kind of thing had "ritual undertones".
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    What you're describing is a ritual in any interpretation of the word.
• chongli 3y ago
  “Ritual use” is a term of art in archaeology. It refers to any object whose survival/economic use is not readily apparent. Basically, anything that isn’t a basic tool (and many things that are tools if they’re decorated) are considered ritual objects. It doesn’t imply any religious purpose. Lots of what people do in life is composed of rituals. Morning coffee ritual, for example.
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    It is beyond ridiculous at this point, and serves to make people not take archeology seriously anymore. Where's the shame in admitting they don't know what an object was for? And a coffee maker is not for ritual use, it is for making coffee.
    • lanternfish 3y ago
      I think you could make a very, very compelling case that the process of making coffee is, for many people (especially those really into it), an important ritual which has a lot of significance beyond the specific output. Look at the discourse around the James Hoffman AeroPress saga and tell me that shit isn't insanely ritualized. Nothing religious or spiritual (usually), but you get a lot of time/structure/cycle/morning/sleep/work semiology out of the coffee ritual. In fact, this is so true that coffee as a beverage has adopted significant phenomenological value external to its utility due to cultural osmosis - we have very strong associations between coffee and a variety of abstract qualities: work, awakeness, sleep deprivation, productivity, etc. And, these qualities are quite different between cultures even if the actual raw output/process of production are pretty much the same for many.
      • carlosjobim 3y ago
        By your reasoning, would it be possible for a person to make herself a cup of coffee and drink it without you considering it to be ritually?
        • lanternfish 3y ago
• jcranmer 3y ago
  Because people misunderstand what archaeologists mean when they say "ritual." Every morning, the first thing I do after getting up is go to the bathroom. That is a ritual. Watching the football game every week--ritual. Making your cup of coffee in the morning--ritual. The disconnect is that most people understand "ritual" to have a religious or supernatural component, which none of the examples I've given have. Archaeologists do not understand "ritual" to need this component either. Also note that it is easier to identify the commonality of an object and its associated context than it is to identify what the object is and much, much easier than identifying why it is used. In the context of the Mesoamerican ball game, there is abundant evidence that it is a 1200-year-old version of the NFL, although the biggest difference from modern sportsball is that the players seem to be poorly paid (if at all) from their teams and are more heavily reliant on their sponsorship income.
• clcaev 3y ago
  A humorous take on this is David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_2010/Era1Topic2/Resources/Motel_of_Mysteries.pdf https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_20...