Hominin Burials & Soul Beliefs
In light of yesterday’s post regarding the widespread and naturally explicable belief that humans have spirits or souls, I thought it would be appropriate to continue on a related topic. It is often...
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Religion Reduces Anxiety — Sound Familiar?
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as...
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Archaeology of Ritual & Viking Religion
Archaeologists working in Europe have it good, really good. Depending on one’s interests, you can research just about anything. Paleoanthropologists can work on hominid evolution (i.e., Homo...
View ArticleNatufian Shaman Burial?
This is really cool — an elderly woman buried in the Levant 12,000 years ago with a plethora of grave goods and indications of a feast for her send off. As reported by Live Science, this was a...
View ArticleSanctifying Social Inequality at Chaco Canyon
The story is familiar and follows a similar trajectory wherever people have made the transition from foraging to agriculture: surpluses enable social stratification that is legitimized as part of the...
View ArticleIdentifying “Ritual” in Archaeology
Humans have been engaging with the supernatural for at least 50,000 years and perhaps much longer. Because humans have been writing for less than 5,000 years, this means that some 45,000 years of...
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Soul Beliefs, Grave Goods & Foxes
In many books and articles addressing the origins of “religious” behavior, one will find the assertion that deliberate burials are indicative of soul beliefs and that because people began burying the...
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Gay Cavemen & Buried Shamans
This past week, British newspapers carried sensational headlines about an archaeological find in Prague: “First Homosexual Caveman Found” (The Telegraph) and “Oldest Gay in the Village: 5,000 Year Old...
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Bones, Burials and Ancestors
Death is big business. This past year, Americans spent $15 billion on funeral related expenses. Americans are not outliers when it comes to death spending; funeral related expenditures around the world...
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