DROOGAN JULIAN Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology PDF
DROOGAN JULIAN Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology PDF
DROOGAN JULIAN Religion, Material Culture and Archaeology PDF
and Archaeology
Julian Droogan
L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY
www.bloomsbury.com
Julian Droogan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-8431-3
BL65.C8D76 2012
200.9–dc23
2012019253
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
3 Archaeologies of Religion 71
The Marxist and functionalist context 72
Archaeology as a social science 78
Interpretative archaeology 93
Bibliography 175
Index 191
To Anna, without whose love and support I could never have completed this
book.
My deepest appreciation goes to all the people who provided invaluable
assistance, advice and support to this project, from the perspectives of
archaeology, studies in religion or, occasionally, both. It can be frustrating
being asked to advise and assist in a cross-disciplinary project, and I thank all
those who rose to the challenge with such enthusiasm and encouragement. I
claim, however, all errors and omissions as my own.
I would also like to sincerely thank the University of Sydney and Macquarie
University for offering me the opportunity to pursue and complete this
research, likewise the University of Leiden for its warm hospitality and
generous assistance.
One of the major aims of this book is to argue that human religiosity is rarely
separate from the material environment through which it is expressed, and
that to conceive of material culture and religious culture as opposing or
mutually exclusive spheres of human experience and activity is to limit our
understandings of both fields.
This statement may appear intuitively obvious and simple to illustrate. At a
popular level the religions of the world are often characterized by their striking
material identities. Elaborate, often exotic, costumes, ritual paraphernalia, art,
iconography, monuments, temples, shrines and whole religious landscapes
are some of the primary expressions of a religious tradition. Often, for those
experiencing a religion from the outside, these are the most obvious, immediate,
enchanting, colourful and exciting features, representing difference but also
points of access into the unknown. In the age of globalized tourism this
connection between exotic materiality, foreignness and the experience of the
religious is an especially prevalent and important aspect in the manufacturing
of many tourist experiences.
Equally important and perhaps universal is the tendency for religious
narratives, stories and institutions to derive much of their authority and
legitimacy from tradition and the past. While a religion’s sacred traditions
concerning the past may be preserved and codified as oral or textual
history, there is always a discourse with the material past that takes place in
tandem. In such cases, material culture often appears to be perceived as a
source of religious power and authority. The use of the term ‘power’ can be
understood here to refer to a perception of material things as autonomous
agents, objects or places that project meaningful influence into the world,
apparently independent of any human input. The term ‘authority’ suggests
that this agency is legitimized through references to a referent or cosmology
that transcends the individual or social group, perhaps hallowed by its
associations with the past. Material things and places can come to embody
religious authority and act as powerful expressions that appear to exert
influence and act autonomously through time. In such cases, material culture
acts as a lens that focuses the power of the supermundane, the agency of
that which is beyond the human, into the everyday world. Its very materiality,
perhaps even perceived permanence, gives structure and solidity to values,
powers and forces that may be thought derived from beyond the material
sphere. Sometimes the seeming immutability of a material thing gives the
values and powers it confers the appearance of being eternal and unchanging
fixtures of a non-human order.
The landscapes of India and China are layered with material reminders
of numerous religious worlds. Buddhist stupas and sites of remembered
history such as Bodhgaya point to the many-levelled religious landscapes of
India. In China, whole mountains may be embellished with statues, temples,
inscriptions, pilgrim’s paths and much more. A similar situation also extends
to the so-called historical religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which
claim to derive much of their authority from revealed texts detailing their
people’s ongoing conversation with a transcendent God. But even for these
religions of the book, material culture is still of primary importance as a
source of authority and power. The Hajj to the Kaaba, built on the site of a
pre-Islamic sanctuary, unifies all Islam both globally and with its pre-Islamic
roots, causing enormous numbers of people to move and act in concert across
both space and time. The Christian cult of relics has a long and complex history,
as does the cult of icons. Even Judaism, so long expressed in Diaspora through
textual, oral and action-based modes of self-identity, is intimately connected
to the power and authority that appears to emanate from the sites of ancient
Palestine; the Western Wall being just one example. Of course, all three historic
religions are entangled in the many-layered sacred landscapes, monuments
and material relics of the Holy Land. These are only some of the barest and
most basic examples of the central place that materiality occupies in some of
the better-known world religions.
any universalistic and ahistoric generalizations, and for good reason (this is
explored further in Chapter 3). It will be seen that for archaeologists who have
begun to think about the wider implications of religion in the archaeological
record, the problem has often been one of all or nothing (see Shults, 2010, p.
74); either religion is embedded in virtually every aspect of past material life
and is thus unrecoverable except through a deep contextual understanding of
the culture at hand, or religion can be uncovered as a distinct phenomenon,
as, for instance, the sacred/ritual as opposed to the profane/domestic, in which
case it becomes an aberrant and strange category of unexplained objects on
the fringes of the functional and explicable.
An example is the site of Catalhoyuk, in Turkey, where starting in 1961, the
original discoverer and excavator James Mellaart uncovered what he revealed
to be an early Neolithic farming town 13 hectares in extent with levels going
back to 7200 bce. Mellaart freely interpreted portable art and wall reliefs as
evidence for a Neolithic fertility cult centred on the tensions between a Mother
Goddess and primordial Bull God, and as a result posited the existence at the
site of a prehistoric matriarchal social organization (Mellaart, 1997). Over
the past two decades, however, Ian Hodder, the most influential writer in the
postprocessual movement in archaeological theory, has re-excavated much of
Catalhoyuk and attempted to use multivocal interpretative processes to recreate
differing impression of the site, many of which are highly antagonistic to any
interpretation of Mother Goddess worship (2006; 2010a). Instead, Hodder
has used a particularly fine-grained, multidisciplinary and analytically precise
research methodology to examine, among other things, patterns of movement,
use and decoration within Catalhoyuk’s houses over generational time. This
has led to informed theorization about the cosmological significance of house
structure, the symbolic expression of ritual time and space within homes,
tensions between notions of domestic and wild expressed in house layout and
art, and a religious worldview based around notions of spiritual and hunting
prowess, initiation, the veneration of ancestors and periodic feasting (see
Hodder, 2010b).
It must be fully recognized at the outset that significant and substantial
practical problems abound for any attempted archaeology of religion, but this
does not prevent an examination of the relationship between archaeology and
religion from being both an interesting and useful exercise.
this double failing is the strikingly problematic context within which this
exploration of materiality and religion operates and was conceived. It is
argued that archaeology cannot afford to ignore considerations of religion
in the material record, and the whole aim of this body of work is to begin
to rectify the lack of considerations of the material world found within
the discipline of studies in religion. Yet, it is not the aim of this author
to perform such a critique, or attempted rectification of an unhappy
situation, in a spirit of arrogance or dismissal, but instead to do so in a spirit
of multidisciplinary collaboration and as but one piece of a much wider
attempt to build methodological and theoretical bridges.
Through examining the relationships between archaeology and the
materiality of religion in an attempt to begin to understand how materiality
interacts with religiosity, it is hoped that this book achieves a number of things.
First, it is hoped that it helps clarify and define an exceedingly problematic
area of academic speculation, that of the interface between materiality and
religion. It has already been noted that this problem served as the context
of this research, and that the hope is to begin to bridge the perceived divide
between the two. Through this examination, the nature and character of the
divide have been clarified and the problem has been mapped. In this respect,
this work is part of a larger body of similar academic considerations of the
interaction between materiality and religion.
For instance, since 2005 the journal Material Religion has played an
important role in fostering the embryonic academic study of the materiality
of religion. As noted in the editorial statement of its premier volume (Plate
et al., 2005, pp. 4–9), the journal is an explicit response to the conventional
assumption that religion is solely concerned with speech and reason. Instead,
the examination of material religion includes all the objects that constitute
a lived religion, their uses and their roles. Not only is material religion an
examination of how material things reflect or are shaped by lived religion,
or how religious people understand religious ‘things’, such as iconography,
relics, art, and the like, but it is an acknowledgement of ‘what the images or
objects or spaces themselves do, how they engage believers, what powers they
possess’ (Plate et al., 2005, p. 7). This attempt to explore the perceived polarity
between material culture and religion through the medium of archaeology,
to look at some of the religious potencies and agencies the material residues
Archaeology
Archaeology is the examination of the human past through the means of its
material residues. As noted above, it has always been this focus on materiality
and its discarded nature that has distinguished archaeology from other related
disciplines such as anthropology and history. Archaeology is sometimes
considered (especially in North America) as one branch of the overarching
academic project of anthropology, and this close relationship is particularly
clear in the case of ethnoarchaeology; the attempt to divine formulas useful to
the archaeological interpretation of material culture from the anthropological
observation of contemporary human groups. The issue of how exactly one
defines the discarded nature of the material examined is difficult. Archaeology
certainly differs from anthropology, which often concerns itself with material
things in its examinations of a culture, and also from art history, which almost
always does so. In either case it is possible that the material objects under
examination may have been discarded at some point during their existence.
Anthropologists, however, will generally interpret any material aspects of a
culture in the context of that living social reality, while art historians can use
definitions of ‘art’ to attempt to distinguish their examinations of discarded or
lost material things from that of archaeologists.
The dividing line between archaeology and the emerging interdisciplinary
field of ‘material culture studies’, however, is more difficult, perhaps even
impossible, to draw. This can be illustrated by the number of archaeologists
who have written influential work on the material aspects of human life
outside of archaeological contexts, two prominent examples being Christopher
Tilley (1999) and Michael Schiffer (1999). This book can also be considered
as contributing to this broadening of archaeological method and theory
concerning the social implications and roles of material culture outside of
once traditional boundaries.
The equally difficult boundaries in time between archaeology and earlier
antiquarianism are briefly addressed in Chapter 2, as are the sometimes-hazy
lines between archaeology and forms of speculative and even quasi-religious
Material Culture
There is no set definition for material culture in the wide literature touching on
material culture theory. Apart from the purely ideal, the mental and, dare it be
said, the transcendent, very little is not materially embodied in some fashion.
Text on a page is material, as are our bodies, our brains and the chemical
bases of our thoughts. Even sound waves, which make up the basis of verbal
communication, are material. However, for the concept of material culture to
have any validity it must be defined more specifically than this. Attempts have
ranged from ‘all data directly relating to visible or tangible things such as tools,
clothes, or shelter which a person or persons have made’ (Kieschnick, 2003,
p. 19) – and where ‘data’ includes both the ideas and the practices associated
with the objects – to ‘phenomena produced, replicated, or otherwise brought
wholly or partly into their present form through human means’ (Schiffer, 1999,
p. 12; see also Deetz, 1977, pp. 24–5).
A distinction must be made between the study of material culture on the
one hand, and the process of materialization on the other. The later term
denotes all forms of embodied practice and technology, including dance,
performance, pilgrimage, the human body, music, art, costume, and so on.
Material culture, however, rarely focuses on human embodiment but instead
on externalized material contexts (see Arweck and Keenan, 2006). Material
Religion
Religion is without doubt the most difficult of the three terms to define. Most
definitions of religion, from Tylor’s belief in spiritual beings, Marx’s emotive
open the potential for elements of materiality to play important and active
roles in religious life. The concept of discourse is not restricted to words
and text, but may be used to refer to relations between people and material
things as well. Definitions of religion that rely on any transcendence beyond
the limits of the material universe have been avoided. The reference in the
above definition to religion ‘transcending’ the human and contingent can
point instead to any objectified social relationship, collective norm or ideal;
these may be ‘transcendent’ in the sense that they are consensually imagined
realities that transcend the individual and the contingent. It will be argued
in Chapter 5 that much religion consists of relational forms of reciprocity
between perfectly mundane and everyday subjects. Furthermore, the focus
on practices aimed at producing a proper world acknowledges the central
importance of often prediscursive practical and day-to-day interactions with
a cosmological or religious landscape as a central aspect of religious life in
many traditional cultures.
* * *
The book consists of four major chapters leading from the most general to
the more specific, and a fifth discussion chapter recapitulating the argument
from a broader perspective. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 all progressively narrow
the boundaries of the research and focuses on an ever-tighter examination
of the relationship between religion and materiality. The final fifth chapter
serves to re-examine each of the preceding chapters in light of an expanded
understanding of materiality and religion drawn from the previous critiques.
In this way, it serves to open the argument from the more narrow back through
to the universal and consider some of the religious qualities which material
culture projects, both in the archaeological past and in the present.
the place held by religion in social life, and its interaction with materiality,
considered especially.
The overall failure to address religion in the archaeological record is
attributed to theoretical assumptions drawn from Durkheimian functionalism
and Marxist ideology that have coloured how both religion and material
culture have been thought to act within society, and the roles and functions
they have been thought to play. These theoretical hindrances are examined
in the context of the successive understanding of material culture that they
have facilitated. In such a way, the problematic concepts of material culture
and religion, identified in the last chapter are examined further and in more
detail.
It is argued that an emphasis on functionalism in regard to religion, where
religion is seen as symptom of larger social reality, and Marxism, where religion
is understood as an intrinsically false manifestation of other social processes,
most usually ideology, have both effectively prevented archaeologists from
examining religion in its own terms. It is explained how, in this context, material
culture has been theorized as either reflecting ossified belief-systems, or used as
a medium of relatively inert ideological communication and contestation. This
has prevented the archaeological record from being examined as a locale of
other forms of autonomous religious action and experience. It has also reduced
the role of material culture in human social life to that of communication, to
the reflective transfer of discursive information.
In the end, it is argued that neither cognitive, processual, nor postprocessual
archaeologies of religion have escaped a functionalist or a Marxist position
when addressing religion in the material record.
use of phenomenology to ‘enter into’ past worlds has led them to invariably
engage with past religious cosmologies and worldviews.
It is posited that the dominant interpretative bias that has entered into the
phenomenology of landscape has been the application of the sacred and profane
dichotomy on to the material of the past. This division of the world into two
essentialist spheres is seen as being conceptually false and methodologically
misleading. This dichotomy, however, forms the basis for the differentiation
between the ritual and the domestic in much archaeological categorization.
Implicit in the sacred and profane dichotomy is the concept of some form
of essential sacred ‘power’ that is either inherent in the material landscape or
experienced universally by all human subjects. Modes of landscape archaeology
and ways of understanding ritual that do not rely on an application of the
sacred and the profane to the prehistoric landscape are also considered.
It is argued that to move away from the dichotomization of the past into the
polarities such as ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ or the ‘ritual’ and the ‘domestic’ is
desirable. However, archaeological attempts to do so, and instead see religion
as a phenomenon that saturates all human action and that is embedded in
all aspects of past life, have rarely been able to synthesize ways of identifying
religion in the material past. What such examinations of past landscapes have
been able to do, however, is to open up ways of looking at the material world as
religiously active and potent, rather than as neutral or simply reflective.
Finally, Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration and Pierre Bourdieu’s
habitus are examined in the context of the material landscape and it is suggested
that landscape archaeologists have created a way of looking at the material
world that is amenable to it being both cosmologically infused and religiously
engaged. Material things can be religious subjects as well as objects. This leads
to the possibilities of a substantive way of approaching the materiality of
religion, which is the subject of Chapter 5.
In this way, the ideas of structuration and habitus utilized in the landscape
archaeology critiqued in Chapter 4 are coupled with a more active and dynamic
understanding of material agency, taken from the work of the art historian
Alfred Gell. The problematic understanding of material culture, primarily
as a form of symbolic communication, explored in the context of Marxist
and Durkheimian ‘symbolist’ understandings of materiality in Chapter 3, is
resolved through the adoption of the ideas of index and abduction, also taken
from Gell. The exploration in Chapter 2 of the perceived dichotomy between
religion and materiality, and its origins in the thought patterns of modernity,
is furthered through a consideration of Bruno Latour’s notion of non-modern
hybridized networks of human and non-human agents forming the basis of
social life.
In this way, a discussion of the relationships between material culture
and religion that goes beyond the purely archaeological, although still using
archaeological evidence, is initiated. Elements of the materiality of religion
that have already been covered are further examined and speculated upon
in light of the wider theoretical considerations. For instance, notions of
animism as one of the primary forms of religious engagement with the
material world, the role of material culture in the structuration of society,
the existence of an indwelt ‘power’ seeming to independently arise out from
parts of the material world, and the nature of such sites of long-standing
religious ‘power’ remaining in the face of continuous cultural and religious
change are all re-examined.
In this way this final section provides an elaboration and discussion on some
of the possible ways in which materiality and religion interact. The section
ends with a summing up of some further forms of material and religious
interaction, some of which have already been identified by other fields, and
some of which are novel and would make promising areas of further study.
This chapter also explores the general lack of considerations of the material
elements of religious life found within the academic field of studies in religion.
It is noted that for the most part, studies in religion has avoided both materiality
generally, and drawing on archaeological sources in particular. Through an
examination of the early textual origins of the field, it is explained that there
has been from the beginning an ambivalent approach towards materiality,
observable in the attitudes held by nineteenth-century anthropologists such
as Edward Tylor. For instance, material culture was at one time used as a tool
in diagnosing the levels of ‘cultural evolution’ of particular peoples, while
at the same time, any progression in a people’s religious life was generally
held to necessitate emancipation from this materiality of religion. Further
developments that have gone on to only reinforce this ambivalent attitude
towards materiality are also charted. These include the perception of religion
as characterized by qualities such as interiority, belief, experience and the
division of the social world into the sacred and the profane.
To complement the first section this chapter then provides an introduction
to some of the main practical problems that archaeology has in recovering
religion from the material record. This serves to equip the reader with an
understanding of some of the general and recurrent issues, or hindrances,
relating to religion and materiality that commonly arise in archaeological
theory and practice. Perhaps, the most striking and influential of these general
hindrances is the profound lack of discussions about religiosity to be found
in archaeological writings, or published attempts to reconstruct religion
from the material record. This is a situation that is a direct complement to
studies in religion’s distinct lack of discussions on materiality. Practical
problems with uncovering disembodied and abstracted ‘religion’ from within
the material record are also explored, specifically the tendency for generic
material categories, such as funerary monuments or graves, to be associated
automatically with religion, to the exclusion of most other forms of material
culture. The resulting bias in which the archaeological record is divided into
‘normal’ functional artefacts and ‘abnormal’ non-functional religious artefacts
and objects is also discussed. These practical issues with identifying religion in
the material record are then coupled with accompanying theoretical hindrances,
especially the condition of modernity under which archaeologists work and
the subtle but profound prejudices of secularism. It is argued, however, that if
archaeologists do not attempt to examine religion in the past then others who
are often less qualified, more self-interested and practising forms of religiously
engaged pseudoarchaeology will do so instead.
The main aim of this chapter then is to show that there is a problematic
conceptual mode relating to the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘materiality’
common to both the multidisciplinary field of studies in religion and the
discipline of archaeology. Yet, it is argued that this problem is not sufficient
cause to leave religion out of archaeological interpretations of the past, or
material culture out of studies in religion. Having presented this problem
from the perspectives of both academic fields, and explored some of its
intellectual origins and characteristics, this chapter opens the way for a
detailed examination of various archaeological schools of interpretation and
their posited relationships between religion and material culture presented in
the Chapter 3.
as the basis of human religiosity did not include any consideration or notice of
the material elements of such a religiously embedded domestic world (Asad,
2001). Later, Hudson Smith focused on the psychological, even mystical,
elements of religious life. The mind must be, he argued, released from the
shackle of simple reduction to the brain, and this dualism between mind and
matter is reflected in an equally harsh split between the qualitative soul, even
spirit, removed from the non-sanctified world of quantities, materialities and
objects (Smith, 1992). This is just a small, popular, sample of attitudes to the
material world that are common to the field as a whole, and too numerous and
repetitive to list exhaustively in a work of this size.
This lopsided attitude has not gone unnoticed within studies in religion
discourse. For instance, it has been argued that the omission of the material
substratum of human life from considerations of religion has been partly an
unconscious attempt by scholars to diminish their own discomfort with the
‘messiness’ and alien nature of visceral materiality, especially that of foreign
and unfamiliar cultures and times (see Maffly-Kipp, 2005, pp. 76–8). Yet, the
near ubiquitous nature of this apparent antimaterial bias, its very subtlety and
ability to go unacknowledged, suggests that its causes may be more deeply
ingrained in the history and culture of European scholarship.
The perceived irrelevance of material culture to studies of religion may
stem partially from a perception, traceable in Christianity at least as far back
as the Reformation, that religion is spiritual, carried out through the mind
and the soul, experienced and expressed through interior faith and belief,
and not primarily concerned with objects or externalities (Maffly-Kipp,
2005; Asad, 1993). The privileging of individual ‘interior’ spirituality over
the bodily performance of ritual, or engagement with the material aspects
of religious life can be traced back to Luther and the privileging of personal
spiritual belief over empty ritualism. Protestant reformers such as Zwingli
and Calvin preached and taught against ‘externalism’ and demanded a return
to original textual sources in order to ensure true spiritual advancement, and
this contrast appears to be reflected in the later Cartesian emphasis of mind
over body and matter (Harvey, 2005a, p. 3).
However, the privileging of the insubstantial ‘spiritual’ in favour over the
grossly ‘material’ within Christianity may also be foreshadowed much further
back, to the Pauline division between spirit and matter (see Brown, 1988), the
parts of the world that still used relatively simple technologies manufactured
out of materials such as stone or bone, people like the Andaman Islanders or
Tasmanian Aborigines, were perfunctorily considered to be living remnants
of ancient cultures, living snapshots of human evolutionary history. This
misguided and overly simplistic equation of material object with cultural
sophistication with cultural age, led to a number of early anthropologists of
religion such as Tylor and Frazer positing that, in studying the beliefs and
practices of ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ peoples, they were in fact in direct contact
with the religion of ‘Stone Age Man’ (Sharpe, 1986). In short, a direct analogy
had been created between the development and nature of material culture
and the development and nature of social culture, including religion. Such
an approach was most prominently adopted in the work of Edward Tylor
(1871), where he posited that ‘primitive’, low-technological cultures were a
direct reflection of ‘savage’ religion and vice versa. For Tylor, ‘levels of material
culture must correspond exactly to levels of intellectual, moral and religious
culture, and . . . survivals in one of these areas must inevitably correspond to
survivals in another’ (Sharpe, 1986, p. 58).
The influence of Charles Darwin’s proposed principles of evolution (1859)
was central to this thinking about material things and human religions, based
upon ideas of progress and typology. Examinations of stages of cultural
development and the classification of all sorts of typologies became the norm
through much of the emerging human sciences. In archaeology, evolutionary
thought encouraged Pitt-River’s organizational schemes for the evolution of
artefacts, which gave rise to the whole method of chronologically arranging
artefacts according to developmental sequences, or typology (Bowden,
1991). While for the study of religion, the construction of progressive and
evolutionary schemes of religious development became the base of most
examinations of comparative religion well into the twentieth century. Material
culture, however, faired badly in these schemes vis-à-vis the disembodied
concept ‘religion’. For instance, in most of the subsequent proposed typologies
of religious progression, although material culture was used to chart the
religious evolution of a culture, it was only through the gradual dissociation of
the religious life from the material world of things and objects that a culture’s
progression from savage to civilized, from merely superstitious to approvingly
enlightened, was charted. Material culture, although central to the diagnosis
The very idea that ‘belief ’ is an inner affirmation or affiliation that should
take precedence over all outward behaviour is itself among the most
invidious and pernicious of the doctrines of a particular culture that
This list of spheres of life thought to be separate from religion could just as
easily be extended to include objects, artefacts and the whole material world.
At the same time, archaeology could be added to those forms of academia that
have perpetuated such a blinkered attitude towards religion.
It should also be noted that this subtle but pervasive equation of religion
with ‘belief ’, to the exclusion of action, practice or embodiment, has also
been detrimental to the attempts by archaeologists to successfully identify
religion from within the material record. Archaeologists have traditionally
equated religion with intangible belief, while the material record is equated
with the residues of tangible action. Physical actions such as ritual are thought
to leave empirical traces that can be materially identified, while intangible
religious belief is very difficult for archaeologists to identify materially; it
‘occupies an invisible realm beyond the bounds of reasonable inference’
(Garwood et al., 1991a, pp. v–x). As will be further explored in a later section,
this ontological subtraction of religion from the engaged world of material
things, and subsequent confinement of it to the rarefied and intangible realm
of thought or belief, has created a significant conceptual barrier preventing
many archaeologists from attempting to examine religion and material culture
together.
Exceptions do exist however, often originating from archaeological
examinations of non-Judaeo-Christian–Islamic contexts. For example, Bacus
and Lahiri have suggested that Hinduism may be a religion particularly
amenable to archaeological examination, as it has been more concerned with
what people do, rather than what they think. This emphasis on practice and
action in Hindu religious life ensures that a study of its texts will emphasize
only certain aspects of that religion’s character. Hence, because of this
materialized, rather than internalized, character they ascribe to Hinduism
they postulate that archaeology may be a particularly fruitful exercise in the
Hindu context (Bacus and Lahiri, 2004).
Yet, before completing this overview of the history and nature of the
polarity between materiality and religion, brief mention must be made of
the sociology of religion, especially the early influence of Emile Durkheim
(1926). This is important for at least two reasons. First, following Durkheim,
the sociology of religion has predominantly focused on religion as embodied
practice rather than belief and, in a similar way to archaeologists (who have
oft times modelled themselves on the social sciences), those in the social
sciences have generally directed their attention to ritual rather than religion
per se. Second, certain characteristics of the work of Durkheim, such as
the polarity between the realms of the sacred and the profane, have widely
influenced later work in the study of religion, as well as the discipline of
archaeology.
Robertson Smith in his The Religion of the Semites (1887) described ritual
and practice as the sum total of ancient religions, and suggested that religion
was a body of traditional shared social practices rather than an abstract system
of beliefs. His emphasis on practice rather than belief greatly influenced
Durkheim and, through him, the sociology of religion (see Sharpe, 1986, pp.
80–1). However, this emphasis on practice did not automatically result in
an interest in the material aspects of religious ritual as primary expressions
of religiosity. Instead, religion, ritual, and via ritual the material elements of
religious praxis, all became illustrative of a greater reality – that of an abstracted
‘society’.
For Durkheim, and the many that he influenced, religion, ritual and material
things were all secondary and reflective in nature, utilized as mediums for
expressing greater social truths. Material things especially could be receptacles
for human categories, but they were ultimately passive and reflective in nature
(Latour, 1993, p. 52). A ritual object used by Australian Aborigines could
represent and objectify a greater reified social concept, such as customary
authority and tribal law, for example, but this ritual object would not, according
to Durkheim, ‘act back’ on that society with any autonomous agency. Material
objects could be important participants and props in the social expression of
religion, but they did so through mediating human concepts, never by acting
in and of themselves. This methodological disregard for the possible primary
importance of the material elements of society is reflected in subsequent
research. ‘Social’ sciences have focused their attention on the immaterial world
of disembodied culture while treating the material world as the concern of the
‘physical’ sciences (Dant, 2005). At best, material things are examined as being
reflective or symbolic of particular forms of social communication, while the
actual embodied relationships between subjects and the material world is
ignored, and any notion that material things may play primary and active roles
in social life have, until recently, been omitted. This is not to say that aspects of
the material world have not long been studied and written on by sociologists,
most notably the human body, consumption (see Chapter 3), pilgrimage (see
Chapter 4), but rather that this realm of materiality has traditionally been seen
as having been reflective of abstracted social relationships, rather than as being
primary and active in their creation. This perception of ritual and religion,
and their material correlates, as reflections of human society, and utilized as
expressions of ideology, is explored in detail in the following chapter and it is
enough here to point to its existence.
Similarly, Durkheim’s conceptualization of human social life into a strict
duality between the realms of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, and its extensive
influence on postprocessual archaeologies of landscape, is the subject of
Chapter 4. It is sufficient here to note that this dichotomy between two radically
separate realms of social experience was, for Durkheim, absolute; ‘All known
religious beliefs, whether simple or complex . . . presuppose a classification
of all things, real or ideal, into the classes or opposed groups . . . profane and
sacred’ (1926, p. 37). There was a ‘logical chasm between the two’ (p. 40).
Revealingly, this strict polarity appears to have been informed by Durkheim’s
own perception of a strict duality and hierarchy between the material body
and the insubstantial soul or spirit. In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(2001 [1926], p. 194), Durkheim states that:
[W]e are thus really made of two beings . . . one of which dominates the
other. Such is the underlying meaning of the antithesis that all people have
more or less clearly conceived between body and soul, between the sensate
being and the spiritual being that coexists within us.
This primacy of the soul over the body is reflected in, and even equated with,
the macrocosm of society at large, for:
general ideas that religion or science imprint in our minds . . . do not follow
in the wake of the body. . . . This is because . . . the world of representations
in which social life unfolds is overlaid on its material substrate and does not
originate there. (2001 [1926], p. 201)
For religious man, nature is never only ‘natural’; it is always fraught with
a religious value. This is easy to understand, for the cosmos is a divine
creation; coming from the hands of the gods, the word is impregnated with
sacredness. . . . The gods . . . manifested the different modalities of the sacred
in the very structure of the world and of cosmic phenomena.
Yet, for Eliade, this sacredness is of another order, removed from the realm of
profane materiality. The sacred only appears in the material world as a special
hierophany, as an act of manifestation:
This section explores the common and mysterious absence of religion from
the great majority of archaeological interpretations of the past. It serves as
a general introduction to the problem of the troubled relationship between
archaeology and religion, a way of beginning to think about the issues
involved. It is argued that this state of affairs, while having substantial causes,
is nevertheless unnecessary and perhaps even irresponsible.
First, it is important to boldly and clearly state the problem. Overwhelmingly,
archaeology as a discipline has failed to engage sufficiently with that category
of human experience termed collectively ‘the religious’, and which forms the
focus of the interdisciplinary academic programme of studies in religion. The
reasons for this lacuna have been many and varied, some justified and some
less so, but inevitably it has resulted in a blinkered attitude to the past, one in
which religion has been devalued or ignored. This applies equally to notions of
religion as a personal as well as a social phenomenon; as a mode of personal,
private experience for the individual actors in the past, or as a public element of
past social life. In addition, on the occasions when religion has been seriously
considered by archaeologists there have been a number of problems with the
way that it has been presented and dealt with.
For instance, during the early and premethodological period of
archaeological theorizing, before the emergence of the ‘new’ archaeology in the
mid-twentieth century, religion was frequently thought of as a relatively simple
area of investigation. Some early archaeological approaches to religion were
often remarkably naïve, either adopting an evolutionary model (as explained
above), or presenting themselves as straightforward archaeological adjuncts
to normative text-based historical scholarship. The best example of this naïve
approach is the work by Finegan, The Archaeology of World Religion (1952),
in which he expresses the archaeology of Buddhist and early Hindu India
as an attempt to find material correlates to places mentioned in well-known
religious texts in English translation. Examples include the elaboration of the
archaeology of places central to the life of the Buddha, such as Bodhgaya and
Sarnath, or the identification of the sites visited by Rama and Krishna, in what
amounts at times to almost an archaeological tourist guide to exotic historical
religions (see, for example, Finegan, 1952). Religion has faired little better in
the more recent and methodologically stringent times that have followed the
mid-century attempts to bring archaeological theory and practice closer to that
of the social sciences. As will become clear, in this context religion has for the
most part remained misunderstood, largely untheorized, ignored and omitted
from archaeological literature. When the term, or one of its virtual synonyms
used in the social sciences such as ‘ritual’, has been noticed it has, more often
than not, become shorthand for that which is non-functional, irrational, or
simply insufficiently understood.
Archaeologists have often been accused of borrowing from other disciplines
in order to synthesize their interpretative methods (Insoll, 2004a, pp. 33–4), yet,
in the case of religion there has been a distinct lack of attempts to borrow from
the academic study of religion. In one of the few articles touching explicitly on
the relationship between the disciplines of archaeology and studies in religion,
Demarest claimed that the two disciplines have maintained ‘a close but unsteady
relationship’ over the past century, but that this relationship has ‘matured into
a mutually supportive one’ (1987, p. 372). However the evidence suggests,
instead, a history of mostly ignorance or outright rejection. Archaeologists
attempting to engage with religion have either ignored the academic study of
religion outright, or have rejected certain subdisciplines of the field, such as
the sociology of religion, psychology of religion or history of religion, as either
irrelevant or hopelessly idealistic.
For instance, in his article on the possibilities of a cognitive archaeology
of religion Colin Renfrew acknowledged that a broader perspective was
needed in order to inform what exactly the phenomenon of religion was,
but he looked to nineteenth-century cultural anthropology for an answer
and did not mention religious studies (1994a, p. 47; Parker-Pearson, 2001,
pp. 206–7). Another archaeologist interested in religion, Timothy Insoll,
initially considered the various subdisciplines of studies in religion, under
the supraheading Religionswissenschaft and concluded that the history of
religions under this umbrella encompasses a ‘wealth’ of relevant ideas and
methodologies that might benefit archaeology. He even went so far as to
initially suggest that the overarching framework of history of religions
offered a multidisciplinary superstructure under any archaeology of religion
could function. Three years later, however, Insoll’s initial overemphasizing
of the methodological unity of history of religions, and his overly optimistic
evaluation of its progressive and teleological narrative to human religiosity,
caused him to rethink his initial attraction to the field. Now, because
(according to Insoll) the history of religions looks for a normative essence
of religion, exemplified by the work of Eliade, any archaeology of religion
should not be subsumed within such ‘an idealistic supra-discipline’.
Unfortunately, this approach shows a misunderstanding of the nature of
studies in religion, and overreliance on one single subdiscipline to the
exclusion of many others (Insoll, 2001; 2004a, pp. 38–41).
One result of this methodological lapse has been that the archaeological
engagement with religion has lagged behind most other areas of specialization
of meaning in the past which is not only difficult to materially identify and
examine empirically, but which may distort the very past archaeologists
attempt to reconstruct. One of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of
archaeology is the absolute need for prior categories of meaning to be applied
to the mute past. The reconstructions that archaeologists painstakingly create
are heavily dependent on their decisions to use particular terms and look for
specific types of social activity. The often untheorized categories that they
use at the outset like ‘economic’, ‘political authority’, or ‘religion’ will become
the foundations for whole cultures and the basis for ideas about the basic
function and nature of society.
For instance, the ‘new’ or scientific archaeology of the 1950s, as well as
the processual archaeology that followed, in attempting to generate objective
methodologies for interpreting the past, assumed a view of past cultures that
was reliant on generalized universal cultural ‘laws’ across space and time (see
Chapter 3). In such a climate, using the indefinable and vaguely amorphous term
‘religion’ in the interpretations of the data could result only in the creation of a
static, essentialist, and ahistorical account of human psychology and culture in
the past. Certainly, such an interpretation held little or no explanatory power
or attraction for the scientifically, even positivistic, minded. Yet, later, with
the gradual adoption of more relativist and contextualized methodologies by
postprocessual archaeologists, and the rejection of such universalizing and
essentialist interpretative schemes, religion appears to have become problematic
for exactly the opposite reason. If differing peoples and cultures have all acted
and thought differently and contingently, then imposing the term ‘religion’ on
the archaeological data may assume contemporary categories of thought in the
past where they are not applicable.
In fact, the term ‘religion’ is conspicuous in its absence from the works
of many post-1950s archaeologists, regardless of their interpretative
persuasion. Where it is used, it is usually as a catchall phrase to denote
either the unexplainable or non-functional. This point is further elaborated
and expanded upon in the historical overview of archaeological attitudes to
religion in the material record provided in Chapter 3. This is true certainly of
the work of most contemporary postprocessualist archaeologists, even in the
cases where they claim to be attempting to transcend modernist assumptions
about the past and to open their interpretations of the archaeological record
religion by only one of its elements. The concept of ritual, when used in
religion’s stead, or without any reference to the wider religious context within
which ritual occurs, often leaves the archaeological literature populated with
a dehumanized series of ritual actions, performed by mindless human actors
existing in a seemingly secularized and functionalist world devoid of any
levels of religious meaning, value or experience (see esp. Tilley, 1996a).
Hence from the outset, it can be seen that there are real, substantial and
numerous theoretical and practical difficulties in attempting to reconstruct
traces of religion from within the archaeological record, to ‘make speechless
bones and ochre say something about religious belief ’ (Trompf, 2005, p. 240).
These difficulties centre on the problem of the material identification of
religion, and its derivatives such as ritual. Most importantly, this attempt to
extract the larger (religion) from the smaller (its material correlates), has led
at times to a conflation of the two in archaeological thinking and writing. At
worst this has resulted in the concept of religion as a dynamic and immediate
system of beliefs and practices, as a lived phenomenon, and the problem of its
identification through material residue becoming fused as one. At times, the
result of this conflation of categories has been the creation of a methodological
confusion as to what religion is.
For instance, particular material categories such as graves, ritual objects
and monuments have been linked commonly with the disembodied terms
‘religion’ or ‘ritual’. This ‘terminological shorthand’ (Garwood et al., 1991a, p.
vii) has created a confused baseline of empirical correlates that says much
about archaeologist’s presuppositions and assumptions about religion, but has
done little to offer a way of theorizing the natures and roles of religious life in
the archaeological past or its identification in the material record. Referring
to ritual, Garwood and colleagues (1991a, p. vii) make the point that the
unthinking correlation of material categories with abstract concepts of ritual
allows little scope for a useful definition of ritual or theorizing about the role
ritual played in past social life:
Religion must be theorized as a realm of human life and social behaviour that
exists in and off itself, and to do this archaeologists must look beyond easy
assumptions about its material identification.
As noted, this conflation of religion as a living system that encompasses
many aspects of human individual and social existence, and its material
correlates has led to a linking of particular aspects of the archaeological past
with the religious. Such aspects have classically included graves and burials
(including grave goods), monuments, and art, which have then been considered
as generally ‘non-functional’ according to modern economic and utilitarian
benchmarks. This particularistic approach to the material identification of
religion has resulted in other spheres of human life such as economics, diet,
subsistence, domestication, urbanism and trade as being most commonly
thought of as having little, if anything, to do with religious life. Rather, they are
interpreted according to ‘functional’ rationales.
Ian Hodder’s work at Catalhoyuk (2006; 2010a; 2010b; Hodder and
Meskell, 2010) presents one notable and recent move away from this overly
narrow approach to religion in the archaeological record. Drawing on an
interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, natural scientists, anthropologists
and theologians, Hodder remarks that many of the spheres where religious
activity was eventually tentatively identified were not at all obviously associated
with religion in the minds of the archaeologists at the outset (2010a, p. 26).
Hodder’s painstakingly detailed and meticulous excavation of the domestic
homes at Catalhoyuk has revealed a series of mostly self-contained and largely
self-sufficient houses that each appear to memorialize elements of the wider
cosmos through ritualized activities that were part of everyday life. Evidence
for these rituals includes the periodic application of plaster and wall art, the
inclusion of parts of hunted, dangerous animals such as bull’s horns within
the walls and internal features, the deposition of valuable objects such as
obsidian flakes in ‘hidden’ hoards, and the burial and sometimes reburial of
corpses under homes, including the plastering of human skulls. Religious
activity appears to be so prevalent throughout the archaeology that ‘the houses
at Catalhoyuk and all the activities that took place in them were seamlessly
religious, social and practical’ (Hodder, 2010b, p. 17; 2006, pp. 135–40). This
implies that information about religious activity and life may be recoverable
from a much wider spectrum of the material past than many archaeologists
might at first suppose; the crucial step is to make the decision to look for it.
ritual and religion served to mask and further other, more essential, social
functions, rather than being a valid category of cultural life sui generis. Hence,
one of the most exciting methodological developments in archaeology in the
1970s was the idea that the materiality of death and burial could be used to
elucidate social structure. As will be explained in the following chapter, one
related circumstance was that the place held by religion, under the rubric
‘ritual’, in archaeological reconstructions did come to be theorized explicitly
by processual archaeologists. Yet, this theorization was based upon a reductive
scheme where ritual, and by implication religion, came to be considered as
primarily a form of social communication that functioned to ensure social
equilibrium.
From the 1980s there was a move in archaeological theory towards looking
at how the rituals and monuments of death and burial actually mediated
the ongoing creation of social life, rather than simply reflecting a reified
harmonious society. For some Marxist inspired archaeologists, funerary
rites and the materiality of burial were seen as systems of social non-verbal
communication that could be interpreted not only as fossilized testaments
to past social structure, but as active players in the ongoing creation and
perpetration of that social structure in the past (for the classic text, see Shanks
and Tilley, 1982). These methodological approaches to the archaeology of death
were influenced by Marxist theory that saw the ritual elements of ancient death
and burial as manifestations of ideology and social control. Classic examples
of this approach were Parker-Pearson’s examinations of changing Victorian
burial practices in England, and the changing material nature of burial in
Jutland between 500 bce and 500 ce (1982, pp. 99–113; 1984). Both of these
case studies saw changing types of burial being related to changing ways of
legitimizing and perpetuating the shifting socio-economic order. So, in such
cases the archaeology of death became an examination of how the material
culture of death and burial became an ideological ‘resource’ or ‘weapon’ used
by the elite in the constant creation and perpetuation of unequal modes of
social life.
Importantly, Parker-Pearson did acknowledge the primary need for an
archaeologist to know something of a culture’s beliefs and attitudes towards
death and burial, their religious views, before they could hypothesize the roles
of burial rituals and monuments in wider social life. He termed this knowledge
of how a society structured and thought about its world ‘c-transforms’, and
noted its importance in looking at the burial practices of Cambridge, a highly
differentiated society that nevertheless buried its dead in an egalitarian,
unostentatious manner (Parker-Pearson, 1982; for a discussion see Hodder
and Hutson, 2003, pp. 2–5). Basically, to understand the role of the materiality
of death and burial in cultural change one must have some prior understanding
of some of that culture’s attitudes to life, death and the relationship between
the two. Such knowledge clearly implied an understanding of a culture’s views
on the nature of the human being and their relationship with the wider cosmos
both before and after death, basically their religious worldview. Parker-Pearson
has subsequently applied, with great success, a similar perspective to the
megalithic ritualized landscape surrounding Stonehenge, Woodhenge and
Durrington Walls in southern England. However, the term ‘religion’ itself
was still not used, and once again, religion, by implication, was reduced to
one secondary subsystem in a larger process of social communication and
negotiation.
This particularistic approach, which has reduced past religion to the domain
of death and burial, can be seen as having been taken to its logical and extreme
conclusion with Parker-Pearson’s suggestion that it was the fearful appreciation
of death itself that provided the very origins of religious belief in the past. This
mono-historical vision of the archaeology of religion, and even the origins
of religion, rested upon the hypothesis that it was the human emotional
apprehension of death that became the very existential impetus for the origin
of religious belief in general and the various world religions in particular
(Parker-Pearson, 2001, pp. 203–19). Through examining a cross-section of
the archaeological material culture surrounding death, such as graves, grave
goods and monuments, Parker-Pearson suggested that the emotive experience
of death, fear especially, was not only the original cause of religious belief, but
determined later religious change as well. In support, he traced an evolution
of the material culture of death from the Neolithic through to the end of
the Bronze Age. In doing so he suggested that there was a progression from
ancestor figurines and a ‘cult of skulls’ in Neolithic Jericho which gave way
to the worship of deistic figures in early state and urban Mesopotamia and
Egypt, through the medium of heroic human ancestor gods. He also noted
that the creation of the cosmic cities and monumental edifices of religious
power of Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Egypt, where a celestial cosmic sphere
was reflected materially on earth, might have originated in the building of
graves and monuments to the dead. Parker-Pearson’s implied suggestion that
it is the changes in the actual materiality of death (graves, figures of deities,
monuments) that drive new modes of religious consciousness is novel in
granting an element of creative agency to the material culture of death and
burial. However, more apparent is the conviction that religion is characterized
by interiority and belief. Also apparent is the extremely particular approach of
this extreme example, where literally the whole spectrum of human religious
life, both individual and social, is reduced to its most easily identifiable material
correlates (the archaeology of death and burial) and grounded in a particularly
modern interior and emotive appreciation of death characterized by fear.
It can be seen that religion has mostly been left inadequately theorized
by archaeologists, and that it has been subsumed by derivative terms such as
‘ideology’ and ‘ritual’ and that its identification in the past has been reduced to
commonplace assumptions about the material record. Still, the least useful but
possibly the most familiar, situation in which ‘religion’ has been inadvertently
abused by archaeologists is when it has been used indiscriminately to describe
that which is not understood. In such cases, religion and its supposed synonyms,
such as ‘symbolic’ and especially ‘ritual’, have been employed to describe and
categorize material artefacts and relationships in the archaeological record
that either defy rational functionalist interpretation, or are just plain baffling.
In such situations, the religious has become a descriptive category for that
which is difficult, and religion is useful only as an ‘all-purpose explanation
used where nothing else comes to mind’ (Bruck, 1999, p. 313).
This use of religion as a last resort for the perplexed archaeologist is so
notorious as to have become a cliché, cited most memorably in Paul Bhan’s
humorous, but at the same time perfectly serious, observation that a confounded
archaeologist can always use the terms ‘religious’ or ‘ritual’ to explain away
the objects which they cannot otherwise explain (1989). As Renfrew has
noted, if an artefact or feature cannot be explained in rational functionalist
terms then it may well be given a ritual function, with ‘ritual’ then becoming
a residual category defined by the absence of ‘a good alternative explanation’
(1994a, p. 52). In such cases, religion is correlated covertly with everything
that is non-functional, irrational, strange, inexplicable or simply odd, and can
quickly become the ‘dustbin’ for any inexplicable data (Hultkrantz, 1978, p. 27,
quoted in Insoll, 2004a, p. 12).
Although flippant, such remarks underlie a very real and specific way that
many archaeologists have perceived artefacts and sites that may have potential
religious frames of meaning attached to them. Recovered material objects
and things that are not understood, that have no apparent use or function,
are categorized as being useless or functionless (Hodder, 1982a, p. 64). In
such cases, terms such as ‘religious’ are used as a form of negative empiricism,
to define as non-functional all that is not understood and, by extension, to
describe as ‘non-religious’ all that is utilitarian and explicable. In such cases
an equation between the polarities functional and non-functional, domestic
and ritual, secular and religious or even profane and sacred is established and
maintained effortlessly. Such attitudes have led commonly to a situation in which
the religious, and hence non-functional and even irrational, realm is passed
over by empiricist archaeologists as ‘speculative and non-scientific’ (Hodder
and Hutson, 2003, p. 26). Speculative it certainly is, as is all archaeological
interpretation, but why it should also be seen as being somehow non-scientific
is problematic.
Overall, then, it can be seen that religion has lagged far behind other areas
in archaeological theorizing. Certainly, the great majority of post-1950s social
scientific and methodologically self-conscious archaeologists have tended to
ignore the possibilities for an archaeology of the religious. The term ‘religion’
has been dropped quietly from much archaeological literature, if it happened
to be included in the first place, and the religious spheres of human life have
been reduced down to a number of smaller and more specific terms such as
‘ideology’ or ‘ritual’. When religion and its correlates have been considered,
there have been difficult and serious problems with their archaeological
identification from within the material record.
Particularly problematic has been the adoption by archaeologists of overly
narrow definitions, or implicit assumptions, as to the nature of religion, for
instance, the equation of religion solely with death and burial. These can
be seen as mono-explanatory understandings of religion that confine the
religious life to a limited sphere of human activity such as death, burial and
the afterlife. In such cases, certain rarefied, usually somehow extraordinary or
abnormal, elements of the archaeological data are recognized as being in some
way concerned with religion. This comfortably leaves the great remainder
of human life in the past to be interpreted according to functionalist logic,
usually in accordance with a reductive theory that considers religious life as
a secondary derivative of somehow more real and underlying economic and
technological processes. Hence, at its most serious this absence and misuse
of the term religion has led to both implicit and explicit reductive and
functionalist perceptual schemes (Lane, 1986, pp. 181–92) that have coloured
and severely disfigure the types of pasts archaeologists reconstruct and write
about. This can be seen in situations where terms such as ‘ritual’ or ‘religious’
have been abused in much of the archaeological literature by serving as catchall
terms used to classify unclassifiable material without any apparent function. In
such cases, religion, if any elaboration is made at all, is reduced to specific
and limited spheres of life in the past characterized by their abnormality or
discordance with the larger sum of archaeological evidence and narrative.
Yet, practical issues are not the sole reasons for the unwillingness of
archaeologists to look for religion in the archaeological record. A priori
conceptual assumptions about the nature of religion appear to play as much a
role in removing religion from the archaeological past as do the physical and
theoretical problems with its material identification. In fact, as suggested above,
practical problems with the identification of religion in the archaeological
record often rest upon assumed methodological theories, or implicit and even
unconscious biases, about the nature of religion and material culture.
The failure of archaeologists to uncover religion in the material record is not
simply the result of the manifold difficulties in identifying religious behaviour
from within the archaeological data, although, as noted above, such practical
problems are real and have played an important role. The philosophical
context within which archaeology arose and has continued to be practised has
also hindered archaeologists in addressing the existence and role of religion.
An a priori concern with a particular form of objectivity, one that excludes
the religious elements of human life as subjective, irrational and somehow
irreconcilable with science, has been particularly detrimental to attempts at
creating archaeologies of religion. In effect, and perhaps with justification,
archaeological attempts to envision an objective past have, until recently,
privileged a secular worldview, one in which religion is absent or, at most,
devalued greatly. Yet, this neglect of religion in archaeological interpretations
has presented the present with a critically inadequate and thus distorted
impression of the past, a past that has sometimes been created in seeming
mirror image of the idealized secular and modernist ‘now’.
Although archaeology as a discipline has made great advances in
its methodologies and practical skills, archaeologists may often lack a
self-awareness of the intellectual and cultural contexts in which they practise
their discipline in the present: what Gadamer (1975) has called the tyranny
of hidden prejudices. It can certainly be argued that the absence of religion
in archaeological reconstructions of the past is as much a reflection of the
practitioners themselves as it is of any limitation in the evidence they discuss.
This is to say that modern academics might not deem religion important or
useful in understanding humans, in understanding the real processes and
drives that propel individuals and societies through time, and hence it has
been omitted from archaeological vocabulary.
Certainly, the data that archaeologists examine is constrained not only by
the real, objective world independent of its observation, but this data is also
dependant on an archaeologist’s own theories and assumptions about this world,
how they wish to observe it and how they wish to categorize it (see Hodder
and Hutson, 2003, p. 18). In brief, the theories that archaeologists espouse
about the past are constrained and dependant on their own cultural contexts,
their social and cultural worldviews. So, in attempting to understand just why
religion has been so inadequately represented in archaeological literature, the
condition of modernity, under which the majority of archaeologists function,
must at least begin to be taken into consideration. The modern paradigm
most archaeologists work under is one that usually excludes various forms of
meaning from the material that they study (J. Thomas, 2004), religious meaning
being one of these.
One of the fundamental filters that condition how moderns view their
world is the Cartesian dichotomy between the subject and the object, under
which it is assumed that the object, the external world, is neutral and value
free up until the point when a rational subject, our internal consciousness,
imposes its own meaning upon it (Crosby, 1997). The method of giving
meaning to the world is characterized as the dispassionate, rational and
analytical examination of neutral and value-free material phenomena. The
world is a ‘blank sheet’ to be rationally and dispassionately examined, and
any other relationships that human minds may have with things, symbolic,
ethical, sentimental or religious, are built ‘on top’ of this primary rational and
dispassionate examination of a neutral backdrop. Religious, ethical, symbolic
and emotional modes of experience are secondary and derivative: they occur
after the fact. These modes of experience are seen rarely as being primary,
immediate or coactive with the very act of perception itself, as suggested in
post-Heidegger phenomenology (Heidegger, 1962, p. 101). Julian Thomas
has argued that the aim of archaeology, a discipline connected intimately to
modern experience and indeed a ‘distillation’ of a modern sensibility, is to first
strip away these religious, aesthetic, sentimental relationships with the world
prior to any objective and scientific account being made (2004, p. 59).
If this is the case, then the archaeological method, in being scientific,
dispassionate and based upon Cartesian rationality, will struggle to be
able to provide interpretation of meaning or value in the past, least of all
religious meaning. Instead, archaeological attempts to give objective, rational,
dispassionate order to things produce a system of knowledge that is profoundly
modern and, as such, secular and non-religious. Such methods provide much
valuable and crucial data on rational abstractions about the past, such as
chronology, manufacture, underlying social ‘functions’ (concepts of which the
inhabitants of the past themselves would most likely have had little notion),
but it cannot give us information about other frames of meaning such as the
religious.
Again, Julian Thomas (2004, p. 65) argues:
Ethics, law or aesthetics are difficult to reduce to pure rationality, and this
means that in order to comply with the demands of the Enlightenment they
must be emptied of their content or be declared to be non-scientific. What
this means is that human knowledge must take a form that can be addressed
using an abstract and formal epistemology, or it must be relegated to a lesser
category of thinking, alongside rhetoric, superstition or fantasy.
[T]he past is dead and we cannot reconstruct it ‘as it was’. There is always a
gap. It was the recognition of that gap and its intellectual consequences that
led David Clark to suggest nearly thirty years ago that archaeology had lost
its innocence. Since then, we also seem to have lost out nerve. We have lost
sight of the fact that, for all of our technique and our rhetoric to the contrary,
the study of the past is an act of the imagination, bound by conventions and
by evidence, but creative nonetheless. (Edmonds, 1999, p. x)
planning, the depreciation of the human form, and the recapitulation of the
divinely ordered macrocosmos to the human microcosmic world through
the creation of ordered urban planning (for a critical discussion, see Kenoyer,
1998).
So, it appears that archaeologists, like all academics, will never be able to
be completely value free and ‘modern’ in their approach to interpretation. The
very approach of modernism will inject implicit biases into their methods and
conclusions. If archaeologists have ignored religion because of their modern
and secular prejudices, then their interpretations given may at times say more
about modern archaeologists and the present than they do about past worlds.
This is certainly true if one examines the development of archaeological
theories and methods over the past century, and charts the long line of modern
interpretative frames (functionalist, Marxist, economic reductionist, cognitive
psychological, socio-biological to name a few) that have been used to ‘explain
away’ past religious belief and practice (see Chapter 3).
The other side of this question needs to be considered as well. It could
well be argued that the very attempt to archaeologically identify past religion
is itself but one more interpretative filter, this time derived from the world
of late modernity where religion appears to be reasserting itself. Religion is
again becoming more visible and perhaps important on the world stage, and
there is a resurgence of interest in issues relating to religion, if not religious
belief itself (Dillon, 2003; Lincoln, 2003). Examples include the increased
interaction between religion and national politics (see Berger, 1999; J. Thomas,
2004), religious fundamentalism (Santosh, 2004), the influence of postmodern
and subjective epistemologies, new religious movements and the ‘new age’
(Possami, 2005). It must be noted that in all of these spheres archaeology
itself plays an important role. Hence, it is likely that in time archaeology
will increasingly mirror these larger cultural currents. A brief consideration
of the phenomenon of ‘pseudoarchaeology’ will serve to illustrate both the
resurgence of a species of ‘religiously engaged’ archaeology in response to
contemporary issues, as well as the problems of an attempted archaeology of
religion becoming, instead, archaeology as religion.
From the 1960s onwards there has been a global increase in
pseudoarchaeological interpretations of the past, especially in North
America, Europe and South Asia (Lefkowitz, 2006). Difficult to define,
such cases it is not necessarily always correct to state that a religiously motivated
reading of a particular site is incorrect. For example, contemporary goddess
followers may agree with the rather fantastic interpretations of the Neolithic
Anatolian ‘town’ Catalhoyuk proposed by the archaeologist Mellaart, rather
than that proposed by a far more rigorous and multidisciplinary researcher like
Hodder (Rountree, 2007), although most archaeologists would probably claim
that the evidence suggests otherwise. The contestation of sites of contemporary
spiritual appeal should not necessarily be seen as a negative phenomenon in
which the objectivity of archaeology is threatened by subjective religiosities.
Instead, it may sometimes be a symptom of the enduring mythological and
spiritual appeal that many archaeological sites continue to have in the present
day. This can be reinforced by the absence of notable public attempts by
archaeologist to breath religious life into their reconstructions of the past, to
reaccess the religiously significant elements of the modern experience of such
locales (for discussion, see Carmichael et al., 1994, pp. 3–21), a reality that
many archaeologists are increasingly aware of and proactive about addressing
(see Hodder, 2006, chapter 1).
However, the dangers of the pseudoarchaeological overemphasizing of
the religious characteristics of the past must be noted. These include the
commonplace tendency for well-known ancient cultures to become the
religious ‘other’ for modern commentators, repositories for comforting
religious fantasies and cultural myths. An example of this is the ancient
Maya. Since its discovery, the archaeology of the Maya has been a prime
‘emotional Shangrila’ for those looking for a place where they can pin their
own religious hopes and fantasies (Webster, 2006). It was only with the
decipherment of Mayan language and script, actually a move away from
pure archaeology, that comforting assumptions, almost cultural myths,
about the Maya (priest-kings, a symbolic and mystical script, a peaceful
and unwarlike culture, pyramid urban centres as hierophanies) began to be
dispelled (Webster, 2006, pp. 143–53). A similar process could be outlined
in the history of the archaeology of many cultures. Ancient Egypt has had its
archaeological remains interpreted as the repositories of religious, mystical
and esoteric knowledge (gnosis), for far longer than the discipline of
archaeology itself has existed (see Jordan, 2006). The pre- or proto-historic
remains of the Indus Valley culture in Pakistan and India are good examples
of this process of religious projection today (Larson, 1995).
quasi-fascist, ends (for the Nazi use of archaeology for similar ends Arnold,
2006). In light of such cynical and extreme misuses, the neglect of religion
in the discipline of archaeology is unhelpful in that it prevents both the
understanding of past human religious life in the archaeological record and
leaves this field of enquiry entirely wide open to the speculations of others.
Practitioners of pseudoarchaeology have exploited these gaps, a few of whom
have malevolent motivations. Although such pseudoarchaeological attempts
to breathe religious colour into the archaeological past may consist of fantastic
and imagined fictions, or consist of creative forms of contemporary myth-
building and appropriations of the past by new religious movements, they
may also be motivated by opportunistic nationalistic, exclusivist or chauvinist
politics. Parker-Pearson put this problem well when he stated: ‘If archaeologists
abandon their efforts to reconstruct the big picture through their own master
narratives they will be trampled underfoot by the many others who are far less
concerned with honest evaluation of the actual evidence and more determined
to impose their politically and motivationally suspect visions of the past and
thence the future’ (2001, p. 217). Archaeologists cannot really afford to leave
consideration of religion outside of their examinations of material culture.
Religion and materiality are not mutually exclusive. In fact, materiality and
religion have never been separate, and to acknowledge this is to widen the
horizons of archaeological research.
* * *
In this chapter, we have explored the received polarity between material culture
and religion from the perspectives of both disciplines. It has been shown how
a disjunction between religiosity and material culture has been common to
the intellectual climate within which the academic fields of archaeology and
studies in religion both emerged. The ambivalent nature of material culture,
where it was used as a diagnostic tool in ascertaining the cultural and religious
progression of differing cultures while at the same time being a sign of their
spiritual backwardness, was noted. It was also shown how privileged visions of
religion as interiority, belief and sacred experience, played a role in furthering
this polarity, where true religion was seen as being a state of mind emancipated
from the material world of action and embodiment.
For archaeologists, during the early premethodological days of the
discipline religious cultures were either viewed within the prism of normative
Archaeologies of Religion
During the period up until the mid-1980s, however, these Marxist and
functionalist biases effectively reduced archaeological considerations of
religion, and largely erased them from a major portion of the archaeological
record. An emphasis on functionalism in regard to religion, where religion
was seen as symptom of larger social processes that acted to provide a ‘hidden’
social function, and Marxism, where religion was seen as an intrinsically false
manifestation of social consciousness, a mostly unimportant by-product of
larger social truths, both served effectively to prevent archaeologists from
examining, or even considering, religion in its own terms. The persistent
polarization between religion and functionality discussed in the previous
chapter, which resulted in the flippant assumption that if the use of an artefact
could not be determined then it must be somehow ‘religious’, was bolstered
by the general functionalist assumptions of the early Marxist archaeologists.
This served to confine supposed religious artefacts to the category of
non-functional aberrations. Concurrently, Marxist inspired suspicions
equating religion and ritual with hidden ideological communication and
repressive social control have echoed down through all the major schools
of twentieth-century archaeological theory through to today. In general, the
result has been that religion has been ignored as either being irrelevant or
unrecoverable.
But it is important to be aware that neither functionalist nor Marxist
assumptions were theorized explicitly as formal archaeological methods until
after the mid-century transformations in which archaeology attempted to
recreate itself as a methodologically coherent discipline in the character of
the social sciences (Watson et al., 1984). Functionalist assumptions formed
the basis of processual systems theory, which reduced religion and ritual to
a homeostatic regulating device (see Clarke, 1968). A Marxist bias towards
materiality, and a consideration of religion as an unfortunate but useful
by-product of inequality, was formalized by postprocessual archaeologists into
distinct theoretical understandings of ritual as a repressive ideological tool
utilized in the subjugation of populations by Machiavellian elites (Shanks and
Tilley, 1982). So, for the bulk of the twentieth century, until at least the very
late 1960s, both ‘functionalism’ and ‘Marxism’ must be understood, in the main,
as generalized theoretical assumptions, or conceptual ‘baggage’, rather than as
explicit methodological stances taken by researchers.
But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is in the world
of man, state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is
an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.
(1844)
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering
and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It
is the opium of the people.
Religion may be visible in human history, but for Marx this very visibility
was a manifestation of false consciousness, and so religion was neither as
influential, primary nor causative as the real materialist history that it masked.
Yet, for Childe, the exact opposite was true. An archaeologist’s spade had the
ability to access directly the true ‘material’ stuff of history, the real bones of
the past social leviathan, and so who, in this context, really needed to consider
aspects of false consciousness such as religion (Childe, 1942)? If religion
masked real materialist history, then archaeologists had the advantage of being
able to dispense with the mask in their interpretations of the primary material
evidence. Considerations of past religiosity would only obscure the truth, in
the characteristic way that religion had done during all those long millennia
until Marx had come to redeem the world.
Such a position certainly reflected a modernist presupposition that religion
was somehow a false or derivative force in social life that holds no inherent
explanatory power, or interest, in its own right. It was implied that thoughts,
ideas, belief-systems, religious experiences and meanings, rituals, practices and
expressions, all the ‘superstructure’ of a culture, were determined wholly by
the productive and economic base, or the environmental and technological
‘infrastructure’, of a society. However, there was as yet no suggestion that
religious behaviour was ‘ideology’, or a covert form of social communication
through which differing levels of society, or classes, attempted to assert their
will over one another, as was later proposed by Althusser (1971). Nor is the
related concept, first suggested by Veblen (1925) and adopted widely in the
disciplines of anthropology and archaeology, that material objects can act
as cultural signifiers, suggestive of social status and able to be utilized as
weapons of ideological competition, apparent either. In fact, the early Marxist
influence on religion in archaeology was limited to a simple privileging of the
material elements of history above the ‘ideal’, and an implication that these
material elements were somehow equal to the material culture archaeologists
uncovered. The further equation that religious life was necessarily removed
from such material contexts was derived instead from the general functionalist
assumptions current at the time, and which were themselves also influenced by
Marxist suppositions.
From the beginning, archaeological examination of the material past has
been primarily concerned with the identification of particular material artefacts
and objects with their past use, or function. The dichotomy in archaeological
interpretation, whereby identifiable utilitarian function was opposed to
unidentifiable religious non-function, was introduced in the previous chapter.
Hawkes furthered this dichotomy with its transformation into a specific theory
of archaeological epistemology. His ‘Ladder of Inference’ attempted to create
an explicit theoretical interpretative formula for archaeologists to apply to the
material, and in doing so it both summarized the pre-existing archaeological
bias against religion and also connected it with a hierarchical vision of
functionality and epistemology. In Hawkes’ (1954, pp. 161–62) opinion:
This division between separate spheres of human activity assumes that they
are inherently different, and can be organized hierarchically in relation to one
another ‘leading up from the generically animal in man to the more specifically
human’ (Hawkes, 1954, p. 162). Not only does this reflect the earlier cultural
historicism of Pitt-Rivers or Lubbock, where the overtly religious occupies the
bottom rung of the ladder, but it explicitly plots this progression against both
the potential for such traits to be archaeologically identified in the material
record, as well as their relative function and utility to society (Bradley, 1984,
pp. 1–4). Hawkes’ interpretative scheme is based upon a negative empiricism,
and this stress on an absence of evidence leading to an evidence of absence, has
resulted in the creation of a covert epistemology in archaeological attitudes to
the religious. So the Ladder of Inference can work as a ‘ladder of understanding’,
a mode of interpretation in itself, in which technology and subsistence are
easier to identify materially and, therefore, they are also considered to have
been the prime movers in social life.
This covert epistemology hidden in Hawkes’ generalizing ‘law’ also reveals
an implied functionalism where all possible functionalist explanations, framed
Overall, it can be seen that during the early part of the twentieth century the
possibilities for religion to be uncovered in the material record receded due to a
number of influences. First, Marxist materialist thought privileged the material,
economic and technical over the false and secondary phenomenon of religion.
This general and pre-existent equation of religion with non-materiality was
furthered by an explicit theorization of the material record in which religion
was seen as being both the antithesis of function and at the same time non-
recoverable from a material context. Utilitarian processes such as economic,
technical, even political spheres of life were characterized as being materially
visible as well as important, while religion and the ‘spiritual life’ was thought to
be invisible and largely unimportant.
Beginning in the late 1940s a new mood regarding the limits and possibilities
for the archaeological interpretation of the past began to emerge in Britain
and North America. The first stirrings of what would become a mid-century
transformation in archaeological theory, method and practice were concerned
mainly with attempts to formulate self-conscious methods for interpreting
the material past that were more objective, scientific and certain than the
impressionistic cultural–historical mode that had gone before (Lyman et al.,
1997). New scientific and overtly methodological forms of archaeology began
to appear following the First and Second World Wars. They were influenced by
the same epistemological disenchantment and felt need to find a new rational
foundation for knowledge that spurred on wider philosophical attempts to
reground knowledge at this time, such as logical positivism (J. Thomas, 2004, p.
68). Initially, this new mood in archaeology had similar reductive implications
for how the materiality of religion was to be addressed.
Archaeologists such as Taylor and Steward attempted to escape the
direct-historical approach to the past by forging a close connection between
anthropology and archaeology. In their methods they defined themselves
in opposition to the proceeding cultural–historical school of archaeological
theory and practice. Generally, cultural–historical archaeology had produced
narratives within which cultures acted as individual ‘characters’ who progressed
through time and space, and in doing so influenced each other through the
an element of residual unease about the ‘treasure hunting’ and ‘druid finding’
of the early antiquarians, and this may have helped turn a new generation of
archaeologists more firmly away from questions of religious life in the past
(Piggott, 1986). Instead, they moved closer to the physical sciences in their
understanding of the material record.
The dissatisfaction with cultural–historical views of archaeological cultures
as being monolithic entities, reified to resemble human individuals with
personal traits and defined characters, was continued into the 1960s with the
beginnings of the ‘new’ archaeology. Rather than looking at cultural typologies,
temporal phases or issues of cultural diffusion, societies were instead conceived
as organic functioning systems of interacting variables that were constantly
in a state of change and adaptation. Cultural change was not an abnormality,
or single event, but rather an ongoing process, one that constantly adapted a
culture to its role as a mechanism of ensuring social equilibrium, organization
and control (Meltzer, 1979). Archaeologists increasingly saw their role as
identifying these underlying social processes, hence the label ‘processual’ to
the emerging new science of archaeology.
This ‘new’ or processual archaeology of the 1960s was an attempt by
archaeologists to catch up with the social theory of the early twentieth
century, and in many ways processualism was an explicit endeavour to
make archaeology into a social science, rather than a colourful, romantic
and inexact adjunct to history (for an early explanation, see Binford, 1964).
For cultural–historical archaeology, epistemology could be quite simple; an
adequate description of the past was, by and large, an adequate explanation.
Instead, processual archaeology attempted to remove subjectivity from the
process of evaluating archaeological claims and adopt a problem-based and
problem-orientated approach to knowledge creation (Binford, 1964). For
instance, the use of a hypodeductive approach to the evidence was widely
advocated (Metzer, 1979, pp. 646–9), and there was also an attempt to utilize
new forms of emerging technology, especially statistics and computers (for
the classic example, see Renfrew, 1973; more recently Fagan, 1988).
This period of methodological self-introspective did serve to allow some
of the various ‘new’ archaeologists to begin to theorize for the first time on
the possibilities of recovering information on religion in archaeological
interpretations of material things. This was especially true of the prehistoric.
to chiefdoms and finally states (White, 1949). During this period archaeologists
did not adopt, or readopt, a similar cultural–evolutionary view of religious
progression and development, in the vein of the nineteenth-century
anthropologists of religion discussed in Chapter 2 (Parker-Pearson, 2001). This
most probably reflected the general lack of consideration of religion rather
than any unwillingness to use progressive and evolutionary teleologies. The
only sign of the existence of such a scheme in the ‘new’ archaeology was the
previously mentioned generalized division of Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze
Age peoples into shamans, monument building ancestor venerators, and
the exploited subjects of despotic priest-kings. However, such evolutionary
religious typologies were to return in the work of the later cognitive processual
archaeologies that speculated on questions of mental evolution and the origins
of religion.
Although there were moves in the ‘new’ archaeology to examine the
archaeology of religion, in general religion had little place in processual
examinations of social change largely because the cultural–evolutionary
anthropology of the time did not consider it to be a crucial phenomenon
in social life. For those who followed anthropologists such as White, culture
was primarily a mechanism for facilitating group adaptation to the physical
environment. Lewis Binford, perhaps the main innovator behind the new
archaeology of the 1960s and many of its subsequent developments, defined
culture as the ‘extra-somatic means of adaptation of the human organism’ (1972a;
1972b). In light of this environmental reductivism, methods of subsistence,
economics and trade took on the central role of important variables in cultural
change. As early as 1967, Binford argued that the capabilities of archaeologists
could be broadened through the use of anthropological and ethnographic
comparison and statistical methods using computers. Archaeologists could
draw on ethnographic analogies with contemporary ‘hunter-gatherer’ peoples
such as the Saami in order to create hypotheses that could then be tested
through statistical means against the archaeological data. Although denying that
religion held any explanatory value, archaeologists, and ethnoarchaeologists in
particular, at this time perpetrated other illusionary narratives. For instance,
they portrayed contemporary Saami people as equivalent with premodern
tribal people who still followed an exclusively hunter-gatherer economy. Yet,
functional and utilitarian rationales prevailed as to determining which cultural
traits were important in effecting change. So, although this use of ethnographic
analogy and prolonged exposure to non-secular traditional peoples did at
times facilitate a greater interest in the religious aspects of human culture,
Binford was committed to a functionalist understanding of social science and
was personally unsure how to go about recovering these religious dimensions
of past society (Robin Torrance, personal communication).
Binford’s attempts at dividing a culture up into a set of archaeologically
identifiable subsystems, and then examining the interaction between these
subsystems and the resulting influence on cultural change, was one of the
earliest attempts by an archaeologist to apply systems thinking to the material
record (see Taylor, 1948, for an earlier attempt). In doing so, Binford became
one of the first archaeologists to theorize explicitly on religion in the material
record by including religion as a subcategory in his systems approach. As noted,
Binford (1972b) defined culture as the ‘extra-somatic means of adaptation of
the human organism’. In this same paper, he listed some of these particular
cultural systems that functioned as adaptive devices. One of these was the
‘ideological sub-systems’ made up, in part, of ‘ideotechnic artefacts’, which
included ‘figurines of deities, clan symbols, symbols of natural agencies etc’
(1972b, pp. 218–20). Binford makes it clear that these ideotechnic artefacts
played a ‘primarily functional context in the ideological component of the
social system’ (1972b, p. 220), but exactly how ideology related to environmental
adaptation, was not at this point made clear. So, in the main, Binford’s vision
of culture as an adaptive mechanism to a hostile environment served only to
promote a reductive view of human culture that was dependent completely
on ecological determinism. It also perpetuated, and enshrined in theory, the
pre-existing functionalist bias inherent in any reconstruction of material
culture that prioritized technological innovation as primary.
Binford furthered this reduction of human culture down to the level of a
mechanism for environmental adaptation in his later work, forging it into the
subdiscipline of environmental archaeology. Under this rubric, archaeology
became an almost entirely positivistic attempt to make large-scale systems-wide
generalizations about human populations (for an early example, see Binford,
1965). There was an explicit attempt to remove considerations of human
subjectivity from archaeology, and instead focus on the macroscale interactions
of demographics, environment, resources and climate. Attempts were made to
synthesize universal cultural covering laws, under which the individual and
their psychology, their religion thoughts and actions, had little relevance to the
workings of the human population en masse (see Binford, 1981).
However, it was the focus on cultures as combinations of discrete
characteristics organized into systems that was to become the dominant
theoretical model adopted by processual archaeologists. Most completely
developed by Clarke, this systems view was modelled on the general systems
theory (GST) originally proposed by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy
(1968), in which numerous complex entities such as organisms, ecosystems,
societies or computer programs could be abstracted as wholes made up of a
number of discrete interacting parts. According to the systems approach adopted
by Clarke (1968), society was made up of a number of discrete, but interacting,
subsystems such as the social, psychological, economic, material and religious.
The economic, subsistence, political, environmental and technological systems
all interacted in a web of relationships that together formed a cultural whole
at any one point in time. However, in accordance with the epistemological bias
perpetuated by Hawkes, Clarke’s systems theory equated the most important
social systems with those that were most easily identifiable to an archaeologist
(such as economic subsistence and technology). For Clarke, religion was one
element within the larger socio-cultural subsystem, itself subordinate to a
nexus of more important functional systems. In this way, religion was again
marginalized not only in terms of material identification, but also in terms of
its very importance in human social life.
Clarke defined religion as ‘the structure of mutually adjusted beliefs relating
to the supernatural, as expressed in a body of doctrine and a sequence of
rituals which together interpret the environment to a society in terms of its
own percepta’ (1968, p. 110). Hence religion was one element in a culture’s
extraphysical means of adaptation to the external environment. Although
Clarke did not elaborate significantly on how exactly religion helped relate a
people to their environment, he appears to have assumed that ritual acted in
some way as a homeostatic device effecting group cohesion, predictability and
social equilibrium. Later, the anthropologist Rappaport suggested that religious
concepts were reinforced concretely and backed up periodically through
private and communal rituals, and in this way rituals acted as a communication
system ensuring the social integration and cohesion of a society. However,
Clarke’s and the early processualists’ positions on the specifics of this matter
is unclear.
But what is clearly apparent is that this highly reductive and functionalist
concept of religion was reinforced and amplified in Clarke’s musings on the
origins and value of religious rituals and structures of belief in archaeological
cultures. For Clarke, religious rituals and propositions were the ossified
remnants and survivals of the past choices a cultural group had made in its
adaptation to the pressures of the hostile world. As part of the socio-cultural
system of a culture, religious motifs could be seen as shadowy memorials
to the systemic trajectories made by a culture in the past. ‘Long after the
situations that prompted specific adaptations have passed, they may survive
in such [socio-cultural] systems – especially embalmed with the conservative
memory of the religious subsystem’ (Clarke, 1968, p. 112). For instance, the
apparent ‘fixation’ with bulls and horns in late Minoan religion is proposed
to have been the preserved memory of an important adaptive period in early
Minoan culture, a time when giant wild cattle were common on Crete and a
‘living part of an economic and religious equilibrium’ (Clarke, 1968, p. 113).
Although, just what the nature of this ‘equilibrium’ was, and how exactly any
specific religious beliefs or rituals originally assisted in the supposedly primary
act of managing the important economic resource of these prehistoric cattle
is neither suggested or explained. Surely, it must have been more sophisticated
than the enshrining of cattle in religious rituals, art and iconography simply in
order to remind people to keep eating them.
There are a number of criticisms that can be made of this systems approach
to culture and religion. First, as we have seen, the way that a society was
broken down into subsystems was not empirical, but in fact reflected biases
general to processualism’s reductive and functionalist approach to cultural
anthropology. Material subsystems (in a Marxist sense of the term) were
privileged as primary. Also, it is difficult to impose such systems back in
time to non-modern contexts. Where would something as ubiquitous as a
group of village women bathing and collecting water for a household fit in a
systems approach: economic (the collection and transportation of resources),
subsistence (providing sustenance), social (gossip), political (gossip), religious
(ideas of purity and bathing), ideotechnic (are their pots decorated), and so
on? Furthermore, according to such a method, all culture, including religion,
was connected with a particular domain of practical activity, and together they
interacted to a limited degree and grouped ‘around’ an early hominid general
intelligence. However, originally these modules were all mostly separate and
self-enclosed and operated in isolation from one another. But, eventually the
barriers between the several specialized intelligences broke down, creating a
new mental fluidity as knowledge began to flow between cognitive domains
(Mithen, 1996, p. 69). At this point, the four domains of practical/technical
knowledge, environmental intelligence, social intelligence and linguistic
intelligence, somehow came together to form cognitive ‘fluidity’. And it was
this new fluidity between formally discrete systems that allowed humans to
begin to do lateral things with their minds, to create metaphor, art, symbolic
thought and, hence, religion.
For Mithen, this was the source of the Upper Palaeolithic ‘revolution’ in
artistic and cultural life, and was also the original fount of human religiosity.
It is suggested that it took place in two stages, with vague totemic and
anthropomorphic thought developing about 100,000 years ago as a result of the
integration of the social and natural history intelligences (the material world
was mistaken for the social world). Then, about 60,000–30,000 years ago, the
addition of technical knowledge to this cognitive mix gave rise to animism,
leading overall to Mithen’s confident assertion that ‘religious ideologies as
complex as those of modern hunter-gatherers came into existence at the time
of the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition and have remained with us ever
since’ (1996, p. 202). The hunter-gatherer worldview, originating in the Upper
Palaeolithic was one in which the social world (thought), the natural world
(matter) and technical knowledge (the application of one to the other) were
connected together by links of analogy and metaphor. For, do not Palaeolithic
cave paintings, such as the ‘birdman’ of Lascaux or the ‘shaman/sorcerer’ of Les
Trois Freres, depict people and animals mixed together to form conglomerated
supernatural beings (see Sidky, 2008, for a critical perspective on these romantic
assumptions)?
Not only does such a scheme repeat the cultural–evolutionary religious
typologies of, say, Lubbock almost word for word, it also attempts to explain
the very origins of religion as the mistaken mixing of the material and social
realms. For Tylor and Lubbock, the earliest and most primitive religions were
those that were most manifested in the material world. For Mithen this was
between the sacred and the profane. Here it is enough to state that, by
adopting essentialist and universal criteria for the ‘religious’ as opposed to the
‘functional’, cognitive archaeologists can only discover in the material record
that which they already expect to find, while simultaneously perpetuating
functionalist and reductive assumptions about the bulk of the material past.
For instance, although Mithen and Renfrew both base their theories of mind
on cognitive psychology, alternative approaches to a cognitive archaeology
have used other criteria, with similarly predictable results. Nash, for example,
has used a concept of mind based upon Jungian archetype theory, in his
examination of prehistoric landscapes. Although his attempts to access the
‘surreal or fantastic quality’ of the material record, and explore a ‘wealth of
transcendental knowledge’ (Nash, 1997, p. 57) are an exciting and refreshing
change to much archaeological literature, his view of past religious experience
is static and universal, rigid and inflexible.
Also, and more seriously, for cognitive archaeologists religion is seen as
‘palaeopsychology’ (Fritz, 1978; for the argument against, see Binford, 1965). It
is a system of beliefs, thoughts and experiences that are located predominantly
in the interior of the mind. Mithen (2001) described the mental realms of
religious belief as a cognitive adaptation to complex human interaction
with the environmental and social world through symbolically structuring
experience. But by privileging ‘belief ’, ‘mind’ and ‘experience’ over ‘action’,
‘body’ and ‘practice’, cognitive archaeologists also favour a vision of religion
that relates it most strongly to the transcendent, non-empirical or supernatural
rather than the worldly, normal and relational. For Renfrew, religion is defined
not simply as belief, but as a certain special type of belief that must not be
about the world or the way that it works but about supernatural forces that go
beyond the world and transcend it (1994a, p. 48).
It can be seen that for cognitive archaeologists material culture may reflect
religious belief, as with Renfrew’s list of material patterns that correlate with
religion or Mithen’s Palaeolithic paintings of half social, half natural objects.
Certainly, the problems of identifying the mind’s ‘ideals when all that survive
are material things’, are acutely recognized (Parker-Pearson, 2001, p. 203).
For Mithen, Renfrew and other archaeologists influenced by the cognitive
perspective, such as Parker-Pearson, it is only when the mind has directly
shaped the material world in a symbolic fashion that its contents can then
be ‘read’, that palaeopsychology can be attempted. For, ‘beliefs and faiths that
Interpretative archaeology
in the same way that ‘new’ archaeology defined itself against the perceived
faults of the earlier cultural–historical archaeology. Sometimes termed
‘interpretative’ (Thomas, 2000) or ‘contextual’ (Hodder and Hutson, 2003)
archaeology, postprocessualism emerged as a series of disparate attempts to
widen the sorts of information archaeologists could gather from the past.
Never a unified field or discipline, it was, and is, rather a general rejection
of the perceived scientism, false objectivity, universalism and lack of agency
characteristic of processual archaeological interpretations of material culture.
This has allowed postprocessualists to place themselves in the convenient
position of being able to label any and all new, innovative and interesting
approaches in archaeology as ‘post’ processual (Thomas, 2000). Matters of
individual thought, action and belief in the past, as well as the importance of
symbolism, art, ritual, metaphor and power have all been significant aspects of
postprocessual theory that have separated it from earlier forms of archaeology.
Although this has in part served to free potential archaeologies of the religious
from the conceptual straightjacket of processualism, overall the majority of
postprocessualist considerations of ritual have failed to escape functionalist
and Marxist assumptions regarding religion. In fact, in many ways, early
postprocessualist concerns with religious ritual as an ideological support to
competing social groups have been a direct continuation of earlier processual
assumptions that religion was one subsystem acting in unison with others to
ensure a society’s ongoing function and adaptation to external and internal
pressures.
Although postprocessualism is largely indefinable, except for its conception
of itself as apart from processualism, certain common ways of approaching
the material record may be singled out in a tentative fashion. For instance,
postprocessualist archaeologists often advocate a plurality and multiplicity
of views on interpretation, and a diversity of approaches to the past. Such
approaches can be grounded in the use of complex ethnographic analogy
that goes beyond the simple law-like scientism of processualism (Hodder
and Hutson, 2003, chapter 8). Ethnographic analogy can be used to inform
contemporary archaeologists of potential past realities that do not conform to
modern perspectives, to suggest contrary, alternative and non-modern ways of
looking at the archaeological record. Also, a focus on individual agency, rather
than abstracted and overarching social institutions, or cultures allows for the
reintroduction of individuals and their agency into the past (for the earliest
discussion of individual agency and social reproduction, see Barrett, 1994).
Most importantly, considerations of material culture as playing an active
role in social life, rather than just being a passive reflection of past social
actions, have allowed some postprocessualists to move beyond a symbolist and
reflective approach to materiality. Material things may be interpreted as having
biographies, and adopting roles in society beyond that of simple commodities
(Kopytoff, 1986). Things, objects, sites and landscapes may be active participants
in the production and constant reproduction of social structures, as well as
their subversion, and therefore cannot be interpreted as direct reflections of
past monolithic societies in a processual mould. The ability of symbolic and
ritual objects to play roles in the negotiation of social life is explored below,
while the material structuration of social life, and its consequences for possible
archaeologies of religion, is explored in Chapter 4.
Many of the common characteristics of the postprocessualist approach to
archaeological interpretation do appear to open up the archaeological record to
considerations of the materiality of religion. In a similar way to processualism,
however, the term ‘religion’ is very rarely used by postprocessualist archaeologists
‘even if [they are] guilty of stressing the symbolic aspects of human action
at the expense of the practical’ (Insoll, 2004a, p. 77). This has been partially
because of an interest in the ideological and symbolic elements of social life, to
the exclusion of alternative and wider social landscapes such as the religious.
In addition, despite a perceived concern with fluid, multiple, and subjective
interpretations of the past, an understandable wariness of attracting the label
‘fringe’ or ‘pseudoarchaeological’ prevents overly ambitious interpretations
of the religious past. Partly, this may be because of perceived connotations
between unwarranted interpretations of the material record and alternative
archaeologies such as neo-Pagan beliefs surrounding megalith sites, pyramids,
goddess worship, and so on.
Instead, the term ‘ritual’ is most often used in postprocessual archaeology,
and its symbolic and material nature examined, rather than the more vague
and less theorized term ‘religion’ (for an early example, see Hodder, 1982a).
This is despite it being often unclear and rather vague as to what is meant by
‘ritual’ in much of this literature. As noted previously, ritual may be concerned
with human action in embodied relation to material culture, while religion
the wider society and project, instead, an ideology that supported comforting
notions of social equality. Ritual was ideology, and ideology communicated a
false consciousness to the masses.
Well expressed here is the postprocessual critique that societies are not
wholes that function as rational superorganisms, in the mould of processual
systems thinking, but rather are collections of multiple social groups, often
with competing interests. Drawing on Foucault (1977), Shanks and Tilley
made a strong structuralist critique advocating a theory of dialectical power
between individuals, social groups and material structures to effect multilinear
social change (1987; see especially their manifesto on power in the appendix).
However, Shanks’ and Tilley’s assumption that only a Marxist reading of
material culture can give archaeologists access to the permutations of this
social world is simplistic. In their interpretation, Shanks and Tilley imply a
cosmological scheme and the social values that it is thought to embody and
promote.
The assumption is that ritual, and the symbols used in ritual, reflected an
ideal image of the world and, in turn, this gives the archaeologist a view of
the idealized social structure. This reconstruction of a whole society, based
upon funerary data, is ambitious. The very concept of ‘ritual’, based as it is upon
Durkheim’s overly stark and ambitiously cross-cultural sacred and the profane
dichotomy, is problematic. More so is the assumption that ritual will necessarily
reflect shared ‘beliefs’ that are universally understood by the performers and
audiences of the past. Discursive understandings of ritual may be multiple and
contested, if they even exist at all. Catherine Bell (1992, p. 183) made this point
well:
materiality of religion that was playing new and crucial roles in the creation of
social complexity, but rather, that it was the group ritual performance that was
the effective agent, and the materiality of religion simply reflected this.
Early postprocessualist Marxist archaeologists adopted Drennan’s idea that
the ‘sanctification’ of ritual legitimized the contemporary status quo and led to
the economic and social stability necessary for a society’s ordered functioning
(see Shanks and Tilley, 1982; Barrett, 1989; 1991). This facilitated an increase in
interest in possible ways that archaeologists could study ritual and, implicitly,
religion.
So, for processualist archaeologists religion, most often hidden within the
term ritual, was a subsystem of social life that acted as a homeostatic device
ensuring social stability and equilibrium. While for early postprocessualist
archaeologists, ritual and ideological practice were also seen as important
in that they created and maintained social hierarchy. The functionalist
interpretations of the place held by religion in past social life adopted by both
processual and postprocessual archaeologies, resulted in similar accounts
of religion in the past. It was a functional mechanism that ensured social
reproduction, despite size, spatial–temporal context, particular character, and
so on. For postprocessualist archaeologists, religion was usually termed ‘ritual’,
to distinguish its material and action-centred characteristics. Although it was
given importance in the interpretation of past cultures, its role was one of being a
mechanism of ideological control. Ritual and religion were first and foremost a
type of symbolism and important mainly as forms of symbolic communication
between peoples or groups. This represented a direct continuation of
reductive and functionalist Marxist thought, from systems thinking through
to postprocessualism, where ideology functions as masking the conflicts and
contradictions that arise due to competitive means of production. Ideology
disguises the arbitrariness of social relations by making them appear natural,
eternal and inevitable. In part, material culture and ritual – the materiality
of religion – were seen as valuable resources for effecting ideological control
because of their conservative, durable and seemingly permanent, otherworldly
and eternal nature (see Chapter 4).
However, early postprocessual critiques of the role or ritual in the past
progressed only a little further than their processual forebears. Rather than
seeing material evidence for ritual and religion as a fossilized reflection of past
social life, they focus on the roles of ideology and belief-systems in serving the
interests of the elites, perpetuating social order, equilibrium and hierarchy, and
preventing social disruption and harmonizing society. But the basic approach
to religion and ritual is the same: it is reductive and functionalist.
Yet, this is not the only way in which ritual was understood by early
postprocessualists to have functioned in the archaeological record. Before
closing this chapter, brief consideration must be made of the early work of John
Barrett, especially his attempt to ‘read’ ritual as a text. Barrett’s consideration of
the nature of the material record as a ‘text’, capable of being ‘read’, influenced
ideas about materiality and religion, especially the active and primary nature of
material culture as an agent in religious life. They also opened the way for the
specifically phenomenological modes of approaching materiality and religion,
as fields of interpretation, which are critiqued in Chapter 4.
In 1985, Linda Patrick argued that there were two ways of looking at the
archaeological record. First, as a fossilized collection of objects which could
be catalogued, compared and sorted into types in order to identify similarities
of type and changes over time. This was the descriptive method common
to the much early twentieth-century archaeology. Second, archaeological
data could be a ‘textual’ record inscribed with the meanings of past human
actors that is thus pregnant with signification, and capable of being read
symbolically by later researchers. An example being the attempts, critiqued
above, by early postprocessualist to ‘read’ ideology into the material symbols
of the past.
John Barrett (1991), however, directly challenged such early postprocessual
attempts at interpreting ritual, claiming that Shanks and Tilley’s interpretations
of ideology in Neolithic mortuary practices, as a cross-cultural sociological law,
could never tell the researcher anything about the past that they did not know
at the outset. For Barrett, rituals did not simply symbolize the ideal world of
the dominant social group and serve to impose this ideological fiction on to
the unwitting masses. Rather, they provided a negotiable field of discourse,
where people could control the multiple layers of symbolism of the political
system by reinterpreting and re-reading the symbolic meaning of ritual
performance. Just as a text is written on a durable substance, and then acts as a
‘field of negotiation’ open to many readers, rituals act as a partially durable set
of actions on human bodies and the material world and, as such, they survive
outside their original context of creation, or authorship. ‘The code of ritual
appears inscribed upon the physical medium through which it is expressed,
a ritual may be interpreted from many competing angles at one time. There
is no dominant power ruthlessly holding on to ideological control with an
unshakable grasp. Power is instead recreated and negotiated constantly.
‘A structure of social authority does not stand naked awaiting the cloak of
ideological legitimacy to be thrown around it by ritual practice’ (Barrett, 1991,
p. 2).
Such ideas about the structuration of society are explored in the following
chapter. It is enough here to round out this examination of Marxist and
functionalist influences on archaeological attitudes to religion by noting that
this theory allowed such presuppositions to be transcended. For the first time,
Barrett’s vision of ritual as a negotiable field of discourses, which is enacted
within certain existential parameters but is nevertheless in a constant state
of flux, allowed for archaeological understandings of materiality and religion
that transcended the functionalist and Marxist presuppositions about religion
as derivative of deeper social processes, and secondary to truer social rules.
Neither were ritual and religion monolithic narratives imposed upon a people
in the interests of social cohesion, environmental homeostasis or privileged
power politics. In addition, material culture no longer had to be seen as
reflective or symbolic of human action or ideology, but could be seen as a
participant in social life, with materiality and society could be seen as mutually
supporting.
As we have seen, for postprocessualists such as Tilley, material culture was
active, but only in so far as it served an ideological function. It acted so that
the system of masking inequality could function. Even whole landscapes could
best be analysed as providing a set of ‘symbolic resources’ used by the elite in
‘the creation and reproduction of structures of power’ (Tilley, 1996b, p. 161).
However, this approach was limited in that it reduced the role of material
culture, and of ritual, in human social life to communication, to the transfer
of discursive information. Other possible modes of perception such as the
emotional, immediate, non-discursive experiences of ritual and materiality
were overlooked. Furthermore, symbols were seen as being univocal and part
of normative systems of belief. But for Barrett (1991, p. 2), material culture
was:
about the world were maintained, and which in turn guided the human
subject’s actions within that culturally mediated world.
whose concerns transcend the human and contingent and that claims for itself
a similarly transcendent status, that includes a set of practices whose goal is to
produce a proper world, and that can be engaged in by either an individual, or a
community. Material agency that is projected from a non-human source into
social life, or perceived by an individual, would, by the very nature of its material
and external origin, be considered to transcend the human and contingent. The
examination of this idea and its consequences for any materiality of religion
must be left as the subject of the next two chapters.
* * *
It can be seen that potential for any discrete archaeologies of religion has been
hampered by a number of biases perpetrated in all schools of archaeological
theorizing over the course of the twentieth century. Marxist and functionalist
assumptions have been the major influences determining how archaeologists
have treated religion during this period. An emphasis on functionalism
in regard to religion, where religion was seen as a symptom of larger social
processes that acted to provide a ‘hidden’ social function, and Marxism,
where religion was seen as an intrinsically false manifestation of social
consciousness, a mostly unimportant by-product of larger social truths, both
effectively prevented archaeologists from examining religion in its own terms.
Through the cultural–historical, evolutionary, anthropological, processual and
scientific streams of archaeology, up until about the mid-1980s, these Marxist
and functionalist biases effectively reduced archaeological considerations of
religion, and largely erased them from the bulk of the archaeological record.
As an archaeology of the mind, cognitive archaeology attempted to create
universal and monolithic rules about culture and religion. Practitioners of
cognitive archaeology, such as Renfrew and Mithen, adopted an evolutionary
mode for identifying religious experience and explaining religious change
in the archaeological record, a mode reminiscent of the nineteenth-century
anthropologists of religion such as Tylor. They perceived religion as primarily
a mental construct, a belief-based and mind-orientated phenomenon, and this
distanced it further from the realm of material culture. Cognitive archaeologists
looked for, and found, religion in the usual places. The realms of art, death and
burial were seen as being the only places that materiality could symbolically
reflect religious life because they are the closest material reflections of mind
Unfortunately, the dominant interpretative bias that has entered into the
phenomenology of landscape in regard to religion has been the application of
the sacred and profane dichotomy onto the material of the past. As we will see,
this dichotomy forms the basis for the differentiation between the ritual and
the domestic in much archaeological categorization. Implicit in the sacred and
profane dichotomy is the concept of some form of essential sacred significance
that is inherent in the material landscape. The use of this mode of interpreting
the past must be critiqued, however, as it can only ever lead to ahistoric and
essentialist understandings of both religion and material culture.
That said, there have also developed modes of landscape archaeology
and ways of understanding ritual that do not rely on an application of the
sacred and the profane to the prehistoric landscape. This move away from
the dichotomization of the past into the ‘ritual’ and the ‘domestic’ is desirable.
However, archaeological attempts to do so, and instead to see religion as
a phenomenon that saturates all human action and that is embedded in all
aspects of past life, have yet rarely been able to synthesize ways of identifying
religion in the material past.
What these phenomenological examinations of past landscapes have been
able to do, however, is to open up ways of looking at the material world as
religiously active and potent, rather than as neutral or simply reflective. In
particular, Giddens’ theory of structuration and Bourdieu’s habitus have
been adopted in the context of the material landscape and this had led some
archaeologists to adopt ways of looking at the material world that is amenable
to it being both cosmologically infused and religiously engaged. Material
things can be religious subjects as well as objects, and this is as true of the
archaeological past as it is today. This consideration of the social agency that
material culture can play in religious landscapes leads to the possibilities of
a substantive way of approaching the materiality of religion, which is the
subject of the last chapter.
artefacts rather than merely specific sites or locales (for the theoretical
development, see Dunnell, 1992; Ebert, 1992). The underlying rationale is
that while the consideration of singular sites can reveal limited aspects of past
existence, the consideration of a wider context, the geographical and cultural
setting that each individual site and feature is but one small part of, can reveal
many more. When the materiality of past life is extended to include a wider
collection of objects beyond the usual directly manufactured artefacts clustered
at specific sites, then most elements of the durable material world can come to
be investigated as having an archaeological significance (Dunnell, 1992, p. 34).
In this way, both natural features (such as rivers, rock outcrops, mountains)
and the remains of cultural material (for instance, monuments, ruins, artefacts
scatterings, inscriptions) are able to be considered simultaneously as forming
the basic material constituents of any past landscape (for the archaeology of
natural features see Hirsch and Hanlon, 1995; Bradley, 2000; Lekson, 1996).
Where available, reports from individually excavated sites from within a
bounded area may be incorporated into this ‘holistic’ picture of a landscape,
yet frequently such archaeology requires little or no excavation but merely
a thorough survey of the extant features and surface deposits of a defined
region.
Often collated beneath the umbrella label ‘landscape archaeology’, this
archaeological perspective encompasses differing views on the place held
by the landscape in past cultural life and its significance to archaeological
interpretation in the present. These differences are reflected in the ambiguities
contained within the term ‘landscape’ itself.
The word ‘landscape’ entered the English language in the late sixteenth
century as a derivative of the Dutch word landschap, a term which referred
to a unit of human occupation, as well as a pictorial representation. Schama
remarks that these origins have left ‘landscape’ with dual connotations of both
a utilitarian area of human occupation and jurisdiction, as well as an imagined
and artificial environment, mediated by human design and memory, one
literally ‘created’ and mediated by cultural expectations, much like the Dutch
countryside itself (1995, p. 10). Thomas, highlighting this blend of perception
and reality, links the term ‘landscape’ with pictorial landscape paintings:
images produced for the consumption of nostalgic, alienated urban dwellers
in seventeenth-century Holland. For him, ‘landscape’ is connected intimately
2010). Asad has suggested that ritual is best understood as merely one
among many competing discourses that interact within and through the
social activities of differing cultures in varying ways (Asad, 1979). That this
concept of ritual is often closely associated with ideas about the sacred as a
separate category of experience is well expressed by Goody (1962, pp. 36–7)
who has made the point that:
The term ritual is one that has been used in diverse ways, receiving almost
as much abuse as the word myth . . . most subsequent writers, have identified
ritual with the sacred, a concept that was developed by Durkheim . . . that
served as his alternative to the minimum definition of religion put forward
by Tylor. . . . Durkheim’s dichotomy between the sacred and the profane
seems to me no solution to the difficulty. One of the main grounds upon
which he bases his proposal to adopt sacred as the criterion of the magico-
religious is that this division is one recognized in all societies. This I believe
to be no more than in the case of the natural–supernatural distinction, which
he rightly notes is a categorization imposed by the European observer upon
the practices and beliefs of other societies. If these ideas are not universally,
or even widely, present as folk concepts, that is, concepts employed by the
actors themselves, do they have any advantage . . . the world is indeed divided
in two domains, as Durkheim . . . contended, but it is a division imposed by
the European observer.
notions of the geometry of sacred space in his adoption of the axis mundi
hierophany and its role as the connection between higher and lower worlds in
his examination of the sacred landscape of prehistoric northern Australia. For
Tacon (1999), such an essentialist position allows the archaeologist to organize
cross-culturally material, and thus to ‘see a common pattern – human-made
sacred places modelled on a core set of natural places’, although embellished in
culturally distinct and unique ways (see also Tacon, 1990).
This focus on some kind of inherent ‘power’ that separates the sacred realm
from the profane, and allows an archaeologist to discriminate between what
is religious and what is non-religious in the phenomenological engagement
with the material past has also been influential outside of purely landscape
circles. As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, the polarity between ‘abnormal’ religious
artefacts and ‘normal’ functional artefacts has been common to archaeological
assumptions about the nature of religion in the material record. However, it is
revealing to note that of the two archaeologists who have explicitly written at
any length on the methodology of religion in archaeology, Colin Renfrew and
Timothy Insoll, both have at times adopted a similar essentialist/archetypal
notion of the sacred drawn from the theories of Eliade and Otto.
As we have seen, the centrality of personal experience in Renfrew’s
cognitive archaeology of religion, and the necessity for a universal and
cross-cultural concept of religiosity as a common cognitive phenomenon,
led Renfrew to ground his idea of the human religious experience on
Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous and the holy (Renfrew, 1994a, p. 48).
For Renfrew, it was the irreducible and emotive experience of a mysterious
non-human power seeming to originate outside of oneself that led to the
possibility for uncovering reflections of this common apprehension in the
patterning of the material past. In a similar way, Timothy Insoll has also
taken note of the core, irreducible, holy or numinous experience of the
sacred, and termed it the ‘essence’ of religion. But, for Insoll, the irreducible
and indefinable nature of the numinous/sacred makes it difficult for it to be
applied to archaeological contexts. He is wary of adopting it uncritically. Yet,
he does state that the idea of the numinous may ‘provide a starting point
for a required conceptual framework’ for theorizing religion in archaeology
because it acknowledges the value and existence of religion in and of itself
(Insoll, 2001, pp. 9–10).
Certainly, one would have to agree with Insoll’s wary attitude to the use
of the idea of the holy or numinous, and the sacred and profane dichotomy
it presupposes, in interpretations of archaeological contexts, landscapes or
otherwise. The sacred and profane dichotomy can serve as an easy theoretical
underpinning of the well-used archaeological shorthand terminology that
assumes oppositions between the ‘ritual and domestic’, ‘ceremonial and
mundane’, ‘ideological and functional’, hidden and obvious’, ‘religious and
economic’ and even ‘objective and subjective’. Simultaneously, the perception
that the religious life of human beings is somehow connected with an
irreducible quality of experience and practice is a useful counterbalance to
the functionalist and reductive excesses which much of nineteenth and
twentieth-century archaeology has shown in regard to religion.
Renfrew neatly referred to this contradiction when he noted that the sacred
and profane dichotomy has had the effect of ‘problematizing’ religion in
archaeology by interpreting it as a distinguishable and to some degree separate
field of human activity. But he also noted that this dichotomy has at the same
time facilitated archaeological interpretation of religion (Renfrew, 1994a, p.
47). As we have seen, when activities are consciously set aside for religious or
‘sacred’ purposes an archaeologist may be able to identify their material residue
as having been either symbolic of religious action or conforming to patterns
of religious experience. But if material things have other profane or secular
functions and uses, then the problem of their archaeological interpretation
is compounded. This may certainly be the case in material contexts such as
landscapes, where religion may, like economics, be inextricably embedded
within the matrix of social and material organization. Yet, although Renfrew
suggests that archaeologists may, by utilizing the sacred and profane dichotomy,
be making unwarranted assumptions about religion as a separate subsystem of
social life in order to facilitate their reductive and functionalist interpretative
categorizations, he does not wish to theorize such a problem, but rather sees
it as one of the ‘inescapable constraints’ of a modern perspective and sums up
that such ‘cautionary thoughts are perhaps easier to formulate than they are to
apply in practice’ (1994a, p. 47).
Garwood and colleagues acknowledged this dual problem also when
they used The Sacred and the Profane as the title for the inceptive conference
on archaeology, ritual and religion, at which they attempted to recognize
Certainly, there is much evidence for the long continuity of the use of
particular natural places in European prehistory. Ritual deposits in particular
seem to be present at many places from the Mesolithic all the way through
until the Iron Age, and perhaps even into the Early Middle Ages (Bradley,
2000, p. 153; Allen and Gardiner, 2002). The question is whether examples of
material continuity can be interpreted as also being examples of millennia-long
ritual continuity and, even more difficult, the long established existence of
‘sacred place’. An equally plausible interpretation would be that these apparent
continuities in material culture were as much about consciously manufacturing
and maintaining continuity in the face of social, economic, ritual and religious
change.
Rather than seeing ritual and material continuity as a result of some
imperceptible appreciation of ‘the sacred’, or proof of an ahistoric religious
‘continuity’, these sites may be taken as evidence for Giddens’ (1979) concept
of structuration, where the present is constantly created anew in response to
the past. One religious structure may literally be built on top of another, say
a mosque above a church, but this may be less about the expression of some
timeless continuity of the ‘sacred’ and more about the use of the past by those in
the present to negotiate and create ever-changing social structures. In this case,
the materiality of religion (for instance, monuments, artefacts and landscape
features marking place and memory) can be seen as one malleable resource
constantly used by social actors to shape and negotiate the present. Religious
sites may be appropriated, not because there is some phenomenology of the
sacred underlying their existence, but because they are visible and significant
material actors that participate in social life.
Hence, supposed sacred continuity that involves the appropriation of the
past, or the invention of tradition through building on to the past landscape,
may indicate religious change rather than religious continuity. Modern
applications of pseudoarchaeological interpretation in order to recover the
religious ‘meaning’ of ancient sites, the ‘rediscovered’ cultural significance
of places such as Stonehenge for various neo-Pagan and other groups, for
example, are good contemporary examples of this creative process being either
consciously or unconsciously applied to the material landscape. The material
past, including archaeological sites, are a primary resource in the creation
of religious meaning, and it is their link with perceptions of continuity and
durability that appears to give them this affordance.
distinction, however, between the sacred and profane then ritual action may
not necessarily be distinguished from domestic or mundane actions. In such a
case, ritual can best be understood as an integrated part of daily life.
Ritual may not always be best thought of as a drastically differing type of
action, but instead as a form of communication that is inherent within much
daily action and social practice (see Asad, 1983; Harvey, 2005b; Bell, 1992). This
perspective, seeing ritual as a type of communication that is potentially present
within all action, largely breaks down the sacred and profane dichotomy. For
Sperber (1975) any object could be treated as symbolic, or used as a ritual item.
For Edmund Leach, ritual is not a distinct type of action or behaviour but is,
rather, the symbolic, communicative and expressive aspect of human behaviour
in general. Many objects and activities have practical and technical as well as
expressive and aesthetic aspects. Ritual is where the aesthetic, communicative
component is prominent (Leach, 1982). Mary Douglas gives the example of
the Dinka herdsman, who, in a rush to get home in the evening in time for a
meal, knots a bundle of grass in a material sign of delay. Douglas describes how
the herdsman then redoubles his effort to hasten home once his mind has been
sharpened and his attention focused by the performance of the ritualistic rite.
It is not a magical or ‘sacred’ act which then allows the herdsman to take his
time, it has no practical effective power, but rather is a personal performance
of an action that creates a desired mental state (Douglas, 1966, pp. 78–80).
This ritualistic rite of the knotting of the grass as a materialized sign of delay
can be understood as being one material discourse within a wider religious
framework that transcends the mere human and contingent. It is a practice
that has as its goal the production of a proper world that is in conformity
with the Dinka assumptions about that world. This fits with the definition of
religion given in Chapter 1.
Some archaeologists have also attempted to treat ritual not as a unique kind
of action, but rather as one communicative aspect that is potentially inherent
within all action, and that is displayed within much daily practice (Lane, 1986;
Barrett, 1991; Bruck, 1999). For Harding, ritual and religion are best seen,
not as a particular thing, but as an aspect of things. Instead of terming some
environments ‘ritual landscapes’, he advocates that all prehistoric landscapes
can best be considered as examples of sacred geography. Although Harding
still adopts the term sacred, without fully considering its implications, he does
present a view of the material past that is amenable to the embedded nature
of religion, in which religion, economy and environment are all very closely
related parts of normal everyday life (Harding, 1991; see also Lane, 1986).
However, this very notion of embedded religion is highly problematic. For
instance, Timothy Insoll in his Archaeology of Islam (1999, p. 8) attempted to
illustrate how all aspects of past life could be structured by religion. Insoll
exerted considerable effort to stress that this was not a recapitulation of
Eliade’s ideal and normative traditional world of homo religiosus, in which a
total immersion in sacred time is contrasted with the secular, modern present,
yet, his notions of how such a view differed, or could be translated into an
archaeology of religion, were ill-defined. Although Insoll’s years of fieldwork
in Islamic Africa granted him the ability hold a generous and ‘ethnographically
engaged’ notion of the place held by religion and ritual in traditional daily life,
this ‘embeddedness’ is, ultimately, indefinable. Insoll’s later work attempted to
identify elements of sacred belief in the material residue of past actions, but his
notions of religion as ‘the key building block of identity’ and a ‘holistic package
possibly structuring all aspects of life’ were difficult to transfer into material
correlates (2004a, pp. 17–18, 150). His generalized archaeology of religion,
perhaps inevitably, becomes a sort of general reminder, or ‘rule of thumb’, for
the archaeologist to consider religion as a holistic cultural superstructure.
So, in the case of ritual, determining where exactly, if anywhere, expressive,
communicational action becomes necessarily ritualistic is difficult. If all
human actions have a ritual component, then eventually almost all spheres
of life become, in some way, religious (for the argument against such a loosely
defined and all-embracing ‘non-definition’ of ritual, see Goody, 1977). In
addition, the entire landscape, and every aspect of the material world, would
be considered religious as well – depending on an individual’s point of view.
Debates such as these quickly encompass issues of perception and meaning,
specifically issues of objective versus subjective perceptions of landscape. For
processual and environmental archaeologists, landscapes are best perceived as
fully objective, a set of neutral resources and material objects ‘out there’. For
some phenomenologists, however, landscapes are instead thought of as fully
subjective, as always-already enculturated ‘horizons of intelligibility’. However
if, as we have seen, these ‘horizons of intelligibility’ are conceptualized as
cosmological worldviews with transcendent, or at least transhuman referents
appear to erase the religious as a special sphere of life from the past, rather
than aiding to recover it. Yet, these views do allow for a far more mutually
reflexive, active and dynamic understanding of the relationship between
material culture and religiosity. All material things can be seen as potentially
religious and potent, active and engaged in social reproduction, and it is to the
further elaboration of this theme that we shall now turn.
So far the argument has been made from a number of differing perspectives
that there is a need for both archaeology and studies in religion to acknowledge
the existence of a more mutually recursive relationship between material
culture and human religiosity. In this chapter it has been shown how the
phenomenology of landscape has been an exceedingly productive site for
archaeological explorations of just such a relationship. Although archaeologists
have rarely used the term ‘religion’ in these studies, the questions that have been
raised about the relationship between people’s cosmological perceptions of the
world and their material environments have encouraged understandings of the
materiality of the past as being fundamentally religiously active and potent. In
this section, the nature of material culture as an active agent in religious life is
explored, especially in relation to the ideas of supposed ‘sacred’ continuity and
change at archaeological sites that were outlined above.
Pierre Bourdieu was no friend of religion, but his theory of habitus has
been used by many landscape archaeologists to understand how everyday
ritual action may have reconstituted society over generational time and
left material traces in the archaeological record. Bourdieu himself rarely
considered religion, and when he did it was as an example par excellence
of the subtle and repressive process of symbolic violence: the naturalization
of arbitrary power relationships and systems of meaning so that they are
perceived by social actors as eternal, immutable and objective facts of
nature. As a classic ‘Master of Suspicion’, in the intellectual tradition of Marx,
Durkheim and Foucault, Bourdieu’s work effected to imply that religion was
a form of particularly sinister symbolic violence, one that effectively masks
arbitrary human whim as immutable divine law, and which establishes,
locations may have influenced individual’s thoughts and actions in the past by
determining the potential avenues of movement and sight that were available
to populations (Thomas, 1990, pp. 167–8; 1991; Tilley, 1994; 1996b).
The second way in which landscape exerts cultural meaning is as a heuristic
device recording and transmitting precedent and norm through the medium of
memory. An example is the seemingly ubiquitous human custom of superimposing
mythic stories, legends and values on to any visible geography in a landscape. A
slightly less overt example is the use of language metaphors, idioms and stories.
For instance, the culture and language of the Western Apache in Arizona is
enriched with large numbers of landscape metaphors. The landscape ‘is said
to “stalk people with stories” and because of this they know how to “live right”’
(Tilley, 1999, p. 181; see also Basso, 1996). To act rightly is expressed by the
idiom ‘the straight valleys’, and to lie to one’s relatives or close kin is to ‘cross
into the red earth’. More concretely, an area of jagged and uplifted stones in
the central Nevada desert is taught to be the place where many adulterers have
petrified to stone. To wander in or near this area is to break kinship taboos
(Tilley, 1999, p. 181).
Landscapes can also be constructed and their meanings ‘rewritten’ through
their material embellishment and modification. Rowlands (1994) has described
two different ways in which memory can be enshrined in the landscape. One
is through the commemoration of events, people, occurrences, and so on, in
the special construction of monuments. These are intended to make concrete
a memory, to formalize and control it through the use of material culture. But
this material culture may then be reinterpreted and reused as time goes on.
For instance, monuments can embody authority within a landscape –
sometimes drawing that authority from a landscape itself and at other times
stamping their own authority on to a certain place. Hence monuments
can confer meaning on to a place and as such they can be moved around
the landscape in order to transform and even revolutionize its pre-existent
religious and political associations. One example is the lat pillars that have
monumentalized the landscapes of North India from Mauryan times onwards.
They were originally transported over 1,000 kilometres from their quarry sites
and later many were moved from their original positions to various urban
environments (Irwin, 1987). For instance, a pillar was moved by Islamic sultan
Feroz Shah from Khizrabad to Delhi in the fourteenth century and re-erected
things, leave marks and remain materialized long after their initial act has
passed. The moving of monumental pillars around the landscape, for example,
is an example of durable praxis, albeit of an elitist, exceedingly dramatic and
state-sponsored kind. For Bourdieu, the landscape was lived not read, and any
meanings that were given to places and the spatial order were not fixed or
invariant givens but must be invoked in the context of practice and recurrent
usage. Meanings adhere to a spatial frame only through the medium of human
agency. For Heidegger, the relationship between landscape and praxis was
embodied in the idea that ‘space is practice’ (for examples, see Parker-Pearson
and Richards, 1994, p. 5). He posited that it is only through a person’s dealings
with the objects within the material world that they are immersed perpetually
within that these objects come to have ontological significance. This means
that knowledge of the material world resides in a person’s actions, how they
use and interact with things. Things are significant according to how they
participate and are used in everyday activities.
For example, the stone idol that represents a deity, found in the inner sanctum
of a South Indian temple, such as the Meenakshi temple at Madurai, has a
number of mythological associations attached to it, or better still attached to
that which it represents. Yet, its religious significance is also mediated through
recurrent and familiar usage of its material form and its surrounding material
environment that adheres to certain socially understood rules. The statue can
only be handled by priests of a certain caste, only after a number of ritual
purifications are performed, and while ritual sounds are uttered, and only at
a certain time of the day. The statue may be carried to the outer boundaries
of the temple enclosure and carried in a procession that circumnavigates the
temple precincts. In this procession, the idol is accompanied by many other
material objects (standards, a throne, sceptres, trumpets, etc.), all of which act
as mediators in the social relationships between the people who accompany
the idol. These forms of recurrent usage communicate a host of social and
religious rules, between the priests and the onlookers, but also between
the priests, onlookers and the divine. Rules and norms about the access to
sacrality, purity, caste, boundaries and the temporal order of the day, and by
extension also the year and even the cosmic eon, are all expressed through the
habitual use of this material idol and how it participates and co-creates the
human–material dynamics of the ritual procession. This is an example of how
as practice. For Sperber (1975), in most societies rituals and symbols had no
specific meaning, or many differing and conflicting meanings. Similarly, for
Lewis (1980), rituals can and do exist without exegesis. Rituals may be explicit
and prescribed in regard to the bodily actions of the performers and material
interactions that are played out, while any interpretation of an interior meaning
hidden behind this exterior performance may not be given, may be fluid, may
be forgotten or may never have existed at all. In the manner of Mervyn Peake’s
fictional Gormenghast (1950), the importance inherent within a ritual may be
whether it is performed properly and hallowed by tradition, not any obscure
underlying symbol or meaning. In this way, it may be that in many traditional
contexts social reproduction was partially effected through habitual ritual
performance, and these ritual contexts may have been the primary locales for
the creation of social order and social change (Bloch, 1977). This is an opposite
position to the processualists, who along with Durkheim, saw religion as an
abstracted collection of beliefs and practices that symbolized social facts and
as a whole provided a representation of the social order. Instead, ritual is the
means of both social stability and change, ritual action can provide a society
with homeostasis, but it is also a field of discourse, as suggested by Barrett.
Archaeologists such as Edmonds have taken these concepts a step further
and suggested that ritual was not only practice, but was everyday mundane
practice; what archaeologists have usually termed ‘the domestic’. For Giddens,
it was the practices of daily life that were the most common context within
which social reproduction occurred. For Bourdieu, both ritual and domestic
activities drew from the same cosmological worldviews of a society in order
to give them symbolic meaning, but this did not make them identical. For
Edmonds, rituals were woven into the cycles of everyday routine existence,
and his reconstructions of Neolithic Britain present an image of religious
and cosmological belief-systems being passed down over the generations
through simple acts such as knapping flint, collectively felling an oak or
going on a seasonal trading expedition. According to this picturesque vision,
daily practice was the link between the cosmologically infused paradigmatic
past and the social present: ‘[P]eople’s sense of who they were and what was
expected of them would shape and be shaped by their participation in the
everyday rituals going on around them’ (Edmonds, 1999, pp. 49–50 esp.).
These ethnographies of the Neolithic are important attempts to break down
For Bourdieu, however, the physical locale of habitus, its very materiality, may
be one of the primary embodiments of habitus. He explored how the same
material world, holding within its built form an entire array of cosmological,
ethical, moral, practical and religious frames of meaning, could be perceived
differently by different social groups – such as men and women in a North
African Berber house (Bourdieu, 1970). However, neither Giddens nor
Bourdieu considered the very materiality of material things as a major factor
in the formation of social life, and certainly not in religious life.
Furthermore, the idea that material things may be one of the primary
locations of religious meaning creation is an implication raised by the
adoption of Giddens’ and Bourdieu’s theories by archaeologists, but it has
not been widely applied outside of an archaeological frame, if at all. In terms
of landscape, if people’s subjective experience and sense of identity was in
part embodied within, and drawn from, the material matrix they inhabited,
then their religious experiences and frames of meaning had an ingrained
material component and were not merely subjectively superimposed upon
the world. If this is in fact the case then it must be acknowledged that a good
part of religion dwells within material culture, and that the ‘spiritual’ and the
‘material’ are in fact not opposed at all.
A good non-landscape example of the material structuration of social life
that includes the religious is the basket weaving of the Yekuana tribes of the
Orinoco River of southern Venezuela. According to an ethnography by Gus
(1989), all social communication occurs in unison with the simultaneous
practice of weaving; the process of making baskets orchestrates dialogue
‘conversation simply did not occur without someone making a basket’ (Guss,
quoted in Tilley, 1999, p. 68). For the Yekuana, to tell a story is to weave a
basket, and vice versa. Baskets also provide a material prism through which
the Yekuana universe is reflected, cast in a metaphor of endless dualities. The
symbols and structure of the baskets refer to the oppositions between chaos and
order, visible and invisible, and this cosmological scheme of concentric circles
and mandala-like patterns, is repeated in many spatial and social structures,
including houses, gardens and the village territory. This cosmology is not taught
to the younger generations primarily through verbal communication, however.
Instead, the meanings of the baskets is internalized through their repetitive use
and creation and patterning and this does not require verbalization: ‘Meaning
and making are thus linked and through them culture is reproduced’ (Guss,
quoted in Tilley, 1999, p. 69). So in this case, material culture is not merely the
context in which religious and social life is played out, but rather it is the arena
and medium through which social relationships and structures are created
and recreated, and simultaneously it is the area in which the cosmological and
religious world is explained, produced and actualized.
It has been shown that landscape archaeologists have applied a range of
social theories to the material record in order to engage with past landscapes
in a broadly phenomenological manner. Through doing this, they have raised
a number of interesting implications for the materiality of religion, although
explaining processual change, rather than investigating the interaction between
material culture and religion have been their primary concern. All aspects
of society, including by implication the religious, are transmitted through a
process of structuration. For interpretative landscape archaeologists, this
process of social reproduction occurs through the mediums of a negotiated
and dwelt landscape. Especially important, because archaeologically visible,
is the creation and destruction of material culture, and the actions of people
(praxis) as they negotiate and interact within these constraints. Material culture,
especially in the form of monuments or significant natural places, embodies
cosmological structures and exerts its influence through the attachment
of coded meaning, memory, authority, and these are realized through the
medium of praxis. Forms of religious authority and power are enshrined,
encapsulated and manipulated through the material form of the landscape.
However, the religious agency exerted by some material locales appears to have
an element of autonomy, as is seen in the cases where many different religious
cosmologies congregate at one place, either at once or over long periods of
time. This autonomy is a function of the continuing agency that is exerted by
the material structures, perhaps termed material ‘beings’, present at these sites.
The relationship between supposedly autonomous agency and material sites of
long continuity is the theme explored further in the next chapter.
* * *
We can now see how landscape archaeology, and especially the phenomenology
of landscape, has radically broadened the possibilities for the archaeological
examination of religion in the past. Landscape archaeology has utilized a
more reflexive and active conception of material culture, a conception that has
opened the way for an examination of the materiality of religion. Although the
sacred and profane dichotomy and essentialist concepts of numinous ‘power’
have hampered much landscape archaeology and taken it down a series of
wrong turns towards an essentialized and static understanding of religion, it
has been shown that other ways of looking at the past, in which ritual and
religion are embedded in daily life, can and have also been applied to the
material record with some success.
The theoretical concept of religion as an ‘embedded’ aspect of past life, one
which infuses all aspects of social and individual existence and that is expressed
through habitual ritual and practice, has wide implications. As we have seen,
in some ways the removal of the category of the sacred from the past has been
problematic, as it has removed any criteria for looking for religion as a discrete
and identifiable thing. Yet, the understanding of a religiously infused material
landscape, one that structures and is structured by ongoing human–material
interaction, is attractive. This view replaces the ahistoricism of the sacred and
profane dichotomy and allows for multiple forms of meaning and agency to
be expressed by material things, and it allows for the polarity between the
‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ to begin to be finally deconstructed away.
The phenomenologies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as the
practice theories of Giddens and Bourdieu, have all been essential in the
reconceptualizing of a religious past without the monolithic sacred. What we
have been able to gather from the theories of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
is a phenomenological perspective that situates human being in the material
world prior to any considerations of thought, reflection and objectivity. This
perspective counters the tendency to think of the material world as a product of
human thought as is often the case, and instead it can be seen as a co-producer
of human thought and understanding. This allows an understanding of religion,
in the form of a cosmology, as able to be expressed through the primary and
non-discursive interaction with the material world: a religion that is in fact
inseparable from the material world.
The theories of Giddens and Bourdieu have also allowed us to attempt
to understand how this relationship with materiality may begin to convey,
transmit and co-produce religious institutions through time. According to
theory of structuration through habitus following Giddens/Bourdieu, social
structures are continuously created and perpetuated through the actions and
thoughts – the daily lives – of individuals: in other words their agency. Yet,
this subjective agency is itself shaped simultaneously by pre-existing objective
social structures that unconsciously mould human thought and action. The
two are in a reflexive relationship in which each shapes and determines the
other. When the realm of material culture (in the form of the all-encompassing
landscape) is added to this equation then material culture can be perceived
as forming an important, and at times the most important, medium through
which this reflexive interaction between individual agency and mass social
systems occurs. It can be posited that when cultural experience, meaning and
value are recreated in the human mind as time goes on, they are transmitted
imperfectly from one generation to the next not merely through social
discourse but through the subtle mediums of material culture and landscape
as well. There is a second discourse occurring at the same time, one between
people and things.
That this discourse is intimately connected with the religious life of
individuals and societies is amply demonstrated by the examples of apparently
long periods of material and religious continuity at locales, often in the midst
of dramatic cultural change. Whole religious cosmologies can change, from say
pre-Christian to Christian, but the materiality of the site appears to continue
to exert some form of religious agency. It is to an exploration of how material
culture can be thought to interact and co-produce the religious world that we
shall now turn.
* * *
religious worldview and agency of its creators, owners and drivers. However,
the reality is not quite as straightforwardly reflective as this example might
suggest, and Elias does show how the religious syntax and material form of
the trucks unconsciously structures the positions, stances and movements of
people in relationship with the truck when it is parked at a pit stop (2005,
p. 54). The agency of the material does appear to effect individuals in a way
that goes beyond the mere symbolic and reflective expression of ‘ideology’;
the trucks are participating autonomously in social life, directing how people
move and stand and interact, even if those individuals are unaware of it.
Agency means having the power to do or to act in some way. It can be
expended with seeming autonomy or on the behalf of another, as in the case of
the Pakistani trucks, where human agency has been transferred to a material
thing in the form of elaborate decoration. In this case, material objects can be
seen to have merged with human society in order to extend, and somewhat
modify, the agency of people, their power to act in the world. But as we have
seen in the previous chapter, in such cases the material world does not just
simply ‘reflect’ culture but also takes on an active role in producing it. Agency
gives objects power and potency, and at times they seem to act independently
of their human creators or modifiers.
Archaeologists have explored similar ideas of material agency since at least
Hodder’s Symbols in Action (1982), which was one of the first examples of an
increasingly sophisticated material culture theory being developed within the
discipline. For Hodder, material culture was ‘meaningfully constituted’ in the
sense that its symbolism was not simply a passive reflection of the actions and
motivations of past people. Instead, material objects once formed will ‘act back’
upon the individuals within society in an apparently autonomous fashion; they
are social agents (Hodder and Hutson, 2003, chapter 1).
However, for Hodder, and following him for postprocessualist archaeologists
in general, material culture has not been theorized as having any primary
agency. Instead, somebody must use the material in some way to engineer
an effect, and so it has secondary or instrumental agency. Hodder and
Hutson give the example of spears in Kenya being used by human agents to
negotiate social life. Such spears do not simply reflect or symbolize social and
religious boundaries as signs of prestige, kin and class but they are used by
young men to actively frustrate and change the power of older men through
For Gell, material things are persons because they take part in social
relationships (see also Hoskins, 2006). Social agency can be applied to either
living or non-living things because its definition is relational. ‘It does not
matter, in ascribing “social agent” status, what a thing (or a person) “is” in itself;
what matters is where it stands in a network of social relations’ (Gell, 1998,
p. 123). The interesting thing about material agents is the role that they play
in mediating wider networks of social relationships, between other material
things and between people. Gell did not ‘read’ art as if it was a symbolic text,
but rather he considered art as a series of material objects that act as mediators
in social life. For material things to take on these social roles, all that had to
happen is for them to be in the vicinity of human people. To be in the vicinity
of stones, trees, tables and landscapes is to interact with a whole network of
social agents, of non-human persons; it is almost a form of ‘new animism’
(Harvey, 2005a).
However for Gell, as well as for Hodder, although such objects may appear
to project independent power in society they do so as the mediators of what is
ultimately some kind of distanced human agency. Gell theorized that primary
agents (human persons), distribute their own agency through a network
of secondary agents, which may include material things. These things then
render the agency of the primary agents effective. Material objects do not have
intentionality themselves, but they do have causal efficacy. For instance, in a
similar way to the practice theorists mentioned in the last chapter, Gell posited
that ritual actions by people are a primary way in which human agency is
spread and infused throughout the habitus of a society (Gell, 1998, p. 127).
For Gell, ritual was nothing but action which modern secular people found
unexplainable, but it was a type of action that was particularly efficient at
externalizing mind and agency into the material world. According to Gell’s
general theory of idolatry (1998, pp. 116–6), repeated ritual engagement
with objects such as icons, idols, statues and fetishes results in the perpetual
mediation of human social life by these objects. Idols, because of their
behavioural ineffectuality, cannot be considered primary agents in the full
sense. But they are social others in that they conform to the roles given to
them in society. They mediate social practice and confer divine agency into
the social realm. For example, a Hindu priest holds and upkeeps that role in
society partly because he regularly interacts in prescribed ways with material
idols, religious spaces and architectures, which confer sanctity onto him.
This view that material things have the ability to act back on society
through the medium of their use, or the instrumentality to which they are
put, and that they mediate social relationships through their agency, is little
different to the notions of structuration that we looked at in the last chapter,
or the ‘meaningfully constituted’ nature of material culture as advocated by
Hodder and others. According to this view, primary agents (humans) simply
communicate to one another through the medium of material objects, and
through so doing our externalized ‘statements’ are in some ways modified by
the materiality of the medium. To see how Gell’s understandings of material
agency go beyond that of postprocessual archaeologists, and are of interest for
any materiality of religion, we have instead to look at the types of agency which
material objects can project and to look at how these forms of agency differ
from that of verbal, textual, discursive or symbolic communication.
In Chapter 3 it was explained how Marxist and Durkheimian functionalist
assumptions have been the major influences determining how archaeologists
have treated both material culture and religion during the course of the
twentieth century. An emphasis on functionalism, where religion was seen
as a symptom of larger social processes that acted to provide a ‘hidden’ social
function, and Marxism, where religion was seen as an intrinsically false
manifestation of social consciousness, a mostly unimportant by-product of
larger social truths, both effectively prevented archaeologists from examining
religion in its own terms. But such attitudes also had influential and long-lasting
implications for how the materiality of religion was perceived.
For processual archaeologists, considerations of religion were mostly
removed from the archaeological record. When religion was included in
theoretical approaches, such as systems theory, it was seen as a secondary and
reflective subsystem that was used to regulate the behaviour of members of a
society in relation to their environment in order to effect homeostasis. Material
culture was seen to be reflective of this process, that is, it could tell members of
a society what each other should be doing, and it could tell archaeologists what
long-dead people had been doing. For cognitive archaeologists, material culture
could tell what people had been thinking; it was symbolic and communicative.
For postprocessualist archaeologists both religion and material culture were
predominantly read as symbolic and reflective of ideological statements made
by those who monopolized power relations. This position neither allowed for
considerations of dynamic religious diversity, change nor creative forms of
and text has been made. Material things, places, landscapes and so on, can all
provoke different modes of experience rather than simple reading, they can
‘mean in ways that texts do not’ (Plate et al., 2005, p. 6). ‘Reading’ and ‘text’ may
in fact be metaphors that particularly appeal to academics because they are
some of the primary ways in which they are trained to experience, evaluate
and express the world, but this does not necessarily mean that material culture
is best understood as communicating in a textual fashion. Macdonald, for
instance, has made this point in regard to the active and emotive raw power of
the monumental architecture of Berlin erected during the period of National
Socialism. At the time of its creation, this grandiose monumentality was
sometimes described as ‘words in stone’ (Worte aus Stein), but these ‘words’
were understood as being perceived in a direct and para-cognitive fashion
which bypassed reasoning (Macdonald, 2006). Certainly, religious objects,
icons, idols, relics, monuments, holy places, numinous sites, significant locals
and so on – the list is long – can elicit strong emotional and bodily responses
that do not appear to be based upon textual or even linguistic frames of
reference.
This is another way of saying that material things have multiple forms
of agency, some of which are non-discursive. Material things have latent
powers and abilities to project agency that can do more than communicate
information (even unconsciously) between one person and another. Objects
have the ability to enchant, cause wonderment, terrify, overawe, produce the
sense of the sublime or uncanny, and, in the case of some religious items of
perceived apotropaic power, to heal and modify mental and bodily states.
Material items can also play roles in the mediation of human relationships that
are nowhere consciously realized as being a form of communication between
the participants involved (for examples, see Hill, 2007). An amulet or religious
icon can be gifted, bequeathed, lost, found and pass through a number of
social transformations, and still project various types of potent non-discursive
agency.
Again, in this respect Alfred Gell’s view of the power of art objects is
illuminating. For Gell, art, and hence all material culture, is ‘action-centred’. It
is not about meaning and communication, as usually understood, but about
doing and agency. It is not intrinsically communicative, semiotic or symbolic
(although it can be used as such), but rather it is a system of action, intended
to change the world, and act on the world, rather than encode symbolic
propositions about the world (Gell, 1998, pp. 5–6). Gell termed this form of
perception ‘abduction’, to refer to inferential schemes that have nothing to do
with discursive language, grammar, conscious symbolism, text or linguistic
communication.
For Gell, the emotive-intuitive abduction of an object’s agency could be
seen as an ‘index’, in that it pointed to a power outside of itself from which
its agency originated. For example, the index of a Kenyan spear may be the
warrior who made it, the prowess that is involved in its use or the strength and
cunningness of the animal that it may have dispatched. However, the forms
of agency that an object such as the spear projects may be less discursive and
closer to Gell’s idea of abduction; they may be raw and emotive rather than
thought out and explicitly meaning-laden.
A Catholic Bible, for example, may be used as a dense distillation of the
agency and law of God and His Church, built up over thousands of years;
but at the same time it may predominantly function, in an everyday sense,
as a way of mediating the intersubjective relationships between a priest
who wields the book and the subordinate audience who do not. It may be a
symbol of authority, an object of power, a vital participant in the creation and
performance of effective ritual and more.
So an index can objectify a whole series of relations in its form. The
relationships are not symbolically represented in the object, rather the object
is the ‘visible known which ties together an invisible skein of relations’ (Gell,
1998, p. 62). These relations have produced and are produced by an external
object. In the case of the Bible these relationships include those between God,
the Catholic Church, various supernatural agents such as Angels and the like,
priests and parishioners, and the book now contains and projects all of these
various types of power or agency into the world.
However, one of the crucial elements of Gell’s theory of agency is that this
objectified power may then go on to be attributed to a very different index
from the one it originally derived its effectiveness from. For instance, an
expertly made and beguiling artefact may enchant by pointing to the sublime
primary agency of its maker who was an expert craftsperson. As a text, a Bible
may contain within the words recorded in its pages the agency of dozens or
even hundreds of writers, editors and compilers working over thousands of
years; in its creation and illumination a medieval Bible will also hold within its
bound material form the work of dozens of monks, craftspeople and others, it
will congeal within itself the scriptural, political and economic power of the
Church and its sheer ability to mobilize its production, distribution and use;
but, all of this human agency will be indexed upwards towards the divine, to
God. The index may be displaced from the human to the other-than-human,
and then all the abductions contained ‘within’ the object, artefact or place are
considered in some regard ‘transcendent’.
Certainly, if the creator of the object is unknown then its non-discursive
agency may be thought to point instead to an index that is very different from the
human. Malinowski’s (1922) examinations of the exchange of Kula shell-based
valuables between 18 communities spread across the Massim archipelago
in southwest Papua New Guinea, provide an example of a case in which the
original maker of the objects has been forgotten, and instead a whole network
of social relations becomes materialized into the very fabric of the shells. In
Mauss’s (1923) examination of the gift he identified how elements of human
agency are invested in objects of exchange. Not only do such objects symbolize
things such as social status and wealth, but they are also concrete objects which
mediate the ties of reciprocity between humans. In such a way, gift objects have
an element of social agency, in that they are a large factor in regulating and
sustaining social relationships. They do not just symbolize or represent social
relationships (as Mauss stressed), but they are also crucial and indispensable
players in those relationships. Their agency has become a free-floating form of
power, utilized by individuals to negotiate their own social worlds and by the
society as a whole to mediate the relations of its members.
In such an example, the agency that a material object embodies works as
an ‘index’, referring, or ‘pointing’, back to its human origins while at the same
time being apparently remote from them. This is the crucial characteristic
which materiality brings to the religious world, its apparent immutability,
durability and potential for externalizing abductions of non-discursive agency.
Material things, from icons to cathedrals can point to a transcendent referent
while projecting the non-discursive agency and power of a collective social
group; ‘Even if God is the ultimate author of his resemblance in the forms of
magnificent structures and works of art, it remains the case that . . . human
agency is essential’ (Gell, 1998, p. 114). For instance, prehistoric monuments
that are visible in the landscape often attract local names ascribing them to
the work of giants, supernatural beings, ancestors and so on (Scarre, 2000). As
people try to understand and verbalize the agency that such places appear to
exude, a series of differing stories and mythologies accrete around them, in a
similar way that increasing layers of physical embellishment and materiality
will often do as well.
In this way, ‘divine’, transhuman agency may be externalized into material
things. As with the examples in Chapter 4, landscapes, and especially the
monuments erected by religious cultures within those landscapes, are very
often thought to be the material manifestations of a superhuman agency and
potency, even though they are the remains of human labour. For example:
The great monuments that we have erected to God, the great basilicas
and cathedrals are indexes from which we abduct God’s agency over the
world, and over his mortal subjects who have striven and laboured to
please him, and have left these massive shells (or skins) in their wake.
(Gell, 1998, p. 114)
inspired it (1998, p. 114). In such ways the agency of gods is literally distributed
through the material things of the world.
It could be argued that this process is comparable with Durkheim’s theory
that religion and ritual are expressed through the externalization of group
affiliation into external social structures. For those influenced by Durkheim,
religion is the reified and externalized aspirations of the social group, made
significant through the perception of the ‘sacred’. Yet, the process described
above is different in at least three important respects. First, material objects
that act as social agents are not symbolic reflections of a reified society but
rather are active participants involved in co-creation and continuation of
that society. Second, these material objects or places are not necessarily
experienced emotively as ‘the sacred’, although they may perhaps be in
certain cultural contexts, but are also the basis for a wider range of emotive,
intellectual or action-based abductions. Onto these experiences a range of
non-Western epistemologies, cosmologies and religions that do not adopt the
concept of the ‘sacred’ may be built. Third, such objects are of course material,
and so their very quality of ‘being’, of durability and of externalization, is
dramatically different from that of projected abstracted social institutions
such as ‘the law’ or even Durkheim’s concept of social organized ‘religion’,
that are insubstantial and formed and maintained through collective interior
belief and external ritual. Instead, through abduction, the transhuman and
the transcendent are literally infused into the material world. They become
materialized social agents, and can perhaps best be thought of as non-human
external and apparently autonomous ‘persons’, active beings that take part in
the religious and social life of the community.
An example would be the striking situations where there is an ‘imputation
that there is inherent agency in the material index’ itself (Gell, 1998, p. 32).
This perception of ‘self-made’ material indexes is a common theme from the
history of religions. A good illustration of ubiquity and importance of sites
of apparently self-made agency are the self-manifested idols, objects and
religious sites in the Hindu context. Found across the subcontinent, these
self-manifested objects and places include the pithas, or seats of chthonic power
(sakti), of the goddess Devi, and the jotirlingams, or self-created ithyphallic
linga of the god Siva. In both cases, the sites are spread across the geography
of the Indian subcontinent and are thought to be self-made, either appearing
at the beginning of creation (as with the linga) or as a result of the actions of
a particular god in an earlier era. For instance, the Sakti pithas are commonly
held to be places where parts of the body of the goddess Sati, as well as her
clothing and jewellery, fell to the earth after her self-immolation and sacrifice.
It often appears to be the perceived indwelling ‘power’ of such object and places,
their very removal from the realm of the human but uncanny sense of their
significance nonetheless, that is respected, venerated or worshipped. This is
different from Eliade’s or Otto’s concept of the experience of the sacred arising
through the material world. Instead, the material world itself can be thought to
project various forms of agency; and objects and places can be thought of as
social agents.
This is a perspective somewhat similar to Graeme Harvey’s (2005a) concept
of ‘new animism’, where the non-human world, including material culture, is
thought of as made up of communities of active, relational and social beings. All
of these beings are active participants in society, but that does not necessarily
mean that they are thought of as being ‘ensouled’ or ‘alive’. By definition, animist
cultures conceive of many elements of the material world as being social
agents. They are so, not necessarily because they channel human or ‘divine’
agency (although they may), but rather because they are social agents in their
own right, in need of respectful and etiquette-based forms of interaction in
and of themselves (Harvey, 2005a). This relational perspective is not the result
of a prescientific ‘category error’ as conceived by some nineteenth-century
commentators such as Tylor or de Brosses, but an acknowledgement of the
status that things and places in the material world can have as active subjects.
It is an acknowledgement of their ‘active centred’ role in influencing social life
and in structuring social relationships.
Furthermore, the material objects, structures or locales that are acknowledged
as exerting some form of non-human and transcendent agency within a
religious cosmology may in fact be the remains of human-modified material
culture; they can often be, in contemporary parlance, archaeological. This
has been shown is the case in regard to structures dating from the British
Neolithic (Bradley, 1998), and the local veneration and acknowledgement
of power residing in archaeological remains is common across South Asia
as well (Chakrabarti, 2001; Lahiri, 1996). For instance, in South Asia slag
refuse from the tops of old village ruins is interpreted as being the bones
which the natural world can never be seen as an independent thing in itself
because it is constructed socially, and the social world is never independent
either because it is constantly sustained by things. Rather than looking at
things in themselves as a scientist might, or at humans among themselves as a
social scientist may, or even at discourse between the two (semiotics, language
and text) as many in the human sciences certainly do, Latour sees the networks
as ‘simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like
society’ (1993, p. 6). They hold facts, power and discourse within themselves
simultaneously. For Latour, these networks prove the lie to modernist claims
for the separation between the human and natural sciences, and that is why, for
him, ‘we have never been modern’.
According to this concept of ‘networks’, a monument in the landscape, such
as a temple, is at once a real solid material thing, a social agent, a support
for ideology and a contested site of varying narratives of mythology, to name
but a few possibilities; it is an assemblage of differing forms of social agency.
Although Latour does not focus on materiality especially (nor religion),
material things are important elements in the creation of his networks of
social, factual, moral and religious knowledges.
The example he uses is the creation of the air pump in seventeenth-century
Europe, which became the material hub of a network of new concepts about
experimentation, science, politics, morals, religion and so on. He drew on
the work of Shapin and Schaffer (1985) who looked at the advances made in
science and political theory by two influential seventeenth-century thinkers,
Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle. The invention of the air pump, its material
existence, facilitated the division of political theory and science into two
different knowledge domains, by demanding the separation of Hobbes’ attempts
at non-empirical science from Boyle’s, and Boyle’s concerns about the nature
of kingship from Hobbes. This was because Hobbes’ views on science were
based upon non-empirical ideals, while Boyle’s political theory was grounded
in materialistic empiricism, and it was the invention of the air pump that
revealed the distinction. For Latour, it was the new technology of the air pump,
its instrumentality, which demonstrated the proof of this split by acting as an
active statement that science was empirical rather than social and that political
theory was grounded in human ideals rather than material facts. Once the new
technology of the air pump was activated then ‘all ideas pertaining to God, the
King, Matter, Miracles and Morality are translated, transcribed, and forced to
pass through the practice of making an instrument work’ (Latour, 1993, p. 20).
As such, it became the central material hub of an ever-expanding network of
social and epistemological consequences. The multiplication of the air pump,
its spread throughout the laboratories of Europe and its further technological
modifications further extended this spreading network of social, material,
political and natural knowledges.
So although Latour’s work is not concerned with material culture theory,
archaeology or religion, it has important bearings on all, and certainly on any
notion of the materiality of religion. For instance, by adopting his notion of the
network and applying it to the previous example of the Buddhist monuments
erected around the landscape of North India at the time of the Mauryan
Empire in the third and fourth centuries bce, one can begin to conceptualize
the effects of the expanding network of ethical, political, economic (temples
often managed new forms of land use) and religious knowledges about
the world, and ways of acting in the world, which it created. This is a more
nuanced approach to understanding the mechanisms of the project of ‘nation
building’ carried out by the Mauryan kings, an approach that sees the use of the
materiality of the Buddha’s death and its enshrinement in visible monuments
in the landscape as of equal importance as the use of the more commonly
cited bilingual rock and pillar inscriptions. Furthermore, the concept of
‘network’ allows the conscious political use of these monuments of power
and meaning by ancient state elites to be framed within a wider historical
trajectory, one that admits of pre-established radiations of changing ethical,
political, economic and overly religious knowledges becoming established
around the existing materiality of the landscapes of northern and central
India in the fourth to third centuries bce.
To bring this conception of the materiality of religion into a contemporary
context, one could contrast such a network of differing forms of agency with
those created by the proliferation of statues (contemporary idols) of the
Buddha that are distributed throughout the gardens and homes of the middle
classes in the contemporary West. Generally taken out of their original religious
context, these fragments of the ‘distributed person’ (for this concept, see Gell,
1998, pp. 96–152) of the Buddha may disseminate abductions of aesthetics,
authenticity, identity, non-modernity, spirituality or secularism; and they may
is not allowed to have any relation to the nonhumans produced and mobilized
by science and technology’ (Latour, 1993, p. 28). In such a way modernity
is able to completely dominate either realm on an individual basis, but is
however absolutely unable to contend with the numerous invisible hybridized
networks structuring the world. Certainly, if we adopt the notion that religions
are always hybrids of material and social agents, networks of relationship that
do not fit neatly into many pre-established categories, then Latour’s critique
of modernity fits with the demonstrated unwillingness of archaeologists to
approach religion within the material record, and those who study religion to
avoid addressing materiality.
Latour contrasts the modern position that dismisses such hybrids of
nature and culture with traditional cultures where such hybridized creations
are acknowledged, controlled and warded against. In non-modern societies
without the same post-Cartesian perceptions, the realms of nature, culture,
morals and religions are instead interlinked (not, one would assume, in an
undifferentiated mass, but according to other non-Cartesian schemes, such as
the Maori ‘spiral’ noted in Chapter 4). For Latour, non-modern societies obsess
about the creation of these resulting hybrids and how they will affect them.
He suggests that such non-modern cultures would not have accepted the air
pump with all its inherent baggage, practical and social dangers, but instead
would have ‘conjured away its dangers at once’ (Latour, 1993, p. 42), although
he does not explain how.
This has direct bearing on the notions of materiality and religion, and the
concept of the social nature of material agents explored above. Latour (1993,
p. 42) claims that:
As with Gell’s suggestions about the social and active nature of things, Latour’s
hybridized networks of nature and culture infuse the material world with
active power, and leave people existing within a society of numerous agents,
both material and non-material, human and non-human.
One way that religion is embodied materially then is through the constant
interaction between human–material subjects and non-human material
subjects. Again, at this point Graham Harvey’s concept of ‘new animism’ (2005a)
is revealing. For Harvey, animism is not some form of prescientific category
error performed by childlike savages, but is instead the acknowledgement of a
world in which people interact with many other ‘persons’, many of whom are
non-human. Aspects of the material environment, such as rocks, houses, trees
and everyday objects are more often that non-seen as persons or subjects and
are interacted with according to an ethical and respectful body of etiquette.
This intersubjective relationship is not necessarily based upon peaceful and
cooperative structures; things can still be used, exploited, eaten and so on, but
it is based upon some integrative and relational form of reciprocity. In this
context, much of what we call religion becomes relational, that is, the body
of habitual practices, or praxis, occurring within a world of persons, many of
which are non-human and may be materially embodied.
‘New animism’ is an appealing theoretical mode through which to
think about the role and conceptualization of material agents in religious
life, including from the archaeological past. However it is important to
remember that the idea of material agents as being independently active
is not necessarily one that can or should be transposed onto all cultures,
living or past. Astor-Aguilera, for example, points out that for the Maya
active objects are ‘not literally considered animate since it is the invisible
nonhuman persons in and surrounding the material vessel that are sentient’
(2009, p. 176; 2010), and suggests the use of the term ‘ecological’ cosmologies,
rather than either animistic or supernatural.
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cosmologies in order to think about the active role that material agents play
in much religious life remains useful. In part, religion becomes the ordered
series of relationships that exist between people and their material world (that
includes other people such as animals, vegetation, natural features, artefacts
and celestial objects to name just a few of the possibilities). In a similar way
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abduction 20, 149, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, as a theoretical discipline 6
167, 168, 171, 172 see also landscape archaeology ;
agency, new archaeology ; schools of
God’s 160 archaeological interpretation
human 141, 154, 159, 173 archetype theory, Jungian 92
individual 94, 95, 147, 150 Arnold, B. 68
material 11, 20, 104, 105, 128, 151–3 Arweck, E. 13
religious 145, 147, 165 Asad, T. 15, 25, 118, 124, 130
social 110, 154, 159, 164, 166 Ashmore, W. 113, 116
transcendant 163 Astor-Aguilera, M. 10, 63, 102, 117, 134,
Allen, M. 127 170
Althusser, L. 75, 96, 107 Maya World of Communicating Objects,
animism 20, 34, 89, 134, 150, 165, 170, 171 The 10
see also fetishism; new animism authority 1, 2
Tylor’s definition of 36 political 48
anthropology 24, 31, 153, 165 religious 2, 145
antimaterialism 26 transhuman 116
antimodernity 4
antiquarianism 12, 26 Bachelard, G. 119
antiscientism 4 Bacus, E. 38
archaeological studies (of materiality), Balfour, H. 31
problematic nature of religion Barnes, G. 116
in 43–70 Barrett, J. 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107,
archaeology 12–13 et passim 130, 142, 143
the aim of, Julian Thomas on 60 Basso, K. 138
and anthropology 12 Bataille, G. 118
astroarchaeology 81 Bell, C. 97, 117, 129, 130
as a body of theory 6 Bender, B. 102, 125, 126
characteristic of 5 Bennett, J. 4
environmental 83 Berger, J. 113
interpretative/ post processual Berger, P. 64
archaeology 93–107 Besancon, A. 26
see also postprocessual movement Bhan, P. 56, 99
as a practice 5 Binford, L. 53, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 92,
and religion 71–107 98, 106
Marxism and functionalism, Blain, J. 65
reliance on 72–8 Bloch, M. 142
as a social science 78–93 Bourdieu, P. 19, 110, 135, 136, 140, 142,
subdisciplines of 13 143, 144, 150, 171 see also symbolic
classic archaeology 13 violence
ethno archaeology 12, 113 Bowden, M. 32
historic archaeology 13 Boyle, R. 166
Bradley, R. 49, 76, 111, 114, 116, 127, 143, ecological cosmologies 170
163 ecological determinism 83, 106
Archaeology of Natural Places, An 49 Edmonds, M. 49, 61, 62, 114, 116, 142
Brady, J. 116 Ancestral Geographies of the
Braudel, F. 26 Neolithic 49
Brown, P. 25 Egypt 29, 34, 55, 56, 66, 116
Bruck, J. 56, 129, 130 Eliade, M. 29, 36, 41, 42, 45, 81, 117,
Buddha, the 44 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128,
Buddhism 30 163
Mahamudra Vajrayana Buddhism 161 Elias, J. 151
Enlightenment, the 60
Calvin, J. 25 Enlightenment rationalism 29
Carmichael, D. 66 environmental reductivism 82
Chakrabarti, D. 30, 46, 163 Evens, C. 112, 113
Childe, G. 62, 74, 75
Man Makes Himself 74 Fagan, B. 80
What Happened in History 74 fetishism 33, 34, 37, 165 see also animism
China 2, 81 Finegan, J. 44
Christianity 2, 25, 29, 37 Archaeology of World Religion, The 44
Clarke, D. 29, 73, 84, 85, 88, 98, 106 Forde, C. 79
see General Systems Theory (GST) Foucault, M. 97, 129, 135
cognitive fluidity 89 Frazer, J. 24, 32, 34, 36, 52
Coleman, S. 23 Frend, W. 46
Collins, P. 23 Freud, S. 24
Coningham, R. 30, 46, 161 Friedrich, P. 96
Crosby, A. 59 Fritz, J. 92
cultural materialism, Marxist 24 functionalism 18, 49, 71, 73, 76, 79, 86,
Cunningham, R. 67 105, 155