The study of the origins of religion, ritual practice, and ideology has until recently largely been a concern of anthropology rather than archaeology. Located primarily in the rich body of literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interest in the origin and form of early religious practices and beliefs emerged from investigations into the evolution of cultural forms and elements. For much of the modern period, many archaeologists and anthropologists, in an effort to avoid cultural evolutionary pitfalls, have avoided such inquiry, preferring instead to document the appearance and disappearance of more particular elements of practice or belief, and to investigate their form and function. More recently though, the subject of the origins of religious and symbolic thought and practice has been reopened in archaeology by cognitive-processual practitioners interested in developing an ‘archaeology of mind’ (see Cognitive Archaeology; Modern Humans, Emergence of). In this school, topics like the human capacity for language and symbolic behavior, and the evidence and nature of early shamanistic practices, have been examined within broader explorations of the development of cognitive complexity among Homo sapiens sapiens and their premodern ancestors and Neanderthal contemporaries. Examples of this work include Steve Mithen’s work on the evolution of the mind from generalized, domain-specific intelligence to cognitive fluidity, in which he argues that things like religion and language became possible only after previously isolated modules in the mind dealing with things like social intelligence, technology, and natural history began to communicate with one another. Further, a variety of scholars have investigated the capacity for symbolism and linguistically structured behavior among European Middle Palaeolithic and Middle Stone Age communities in Africa through analyses of stone tool sophistication and morphological variability, decorative artifacts, and the evidence for pigment use, deliberate burial, and grave goods.
It is important to point out that these studies pursue a somewhat different avenue of research to that found in the contemporary work on past religion, ritual, and ideology described below. For the most part, religious thought and ritual practice in these studies are primarily equated with symbolism, and the particular, historical, and variable nature of intentional religious/ritual/ideological practice and belief is eschewed in the search for broader patterns of cognitive development. Finally, while no definitive answers to the origins of religion or language have been forwarded by these studies, they have, to a great degree, broadened the understanding of what might, in cognitive, behavioral, and material terms, constitute a capacity for religious thought and practice.
The origins of religious/ritual practice, and the activities of early religious practitioners, have both been investigated in a variety of recent studies of ‘shamanism’. Beginning with the assumption that shamanism represents a primitive and possibly primary form of religion, many of these works have drawn upon cross-cultural similarities between shamanistic practices, and the ethnography and ethnoarchaeology of contemporary foraging societies in southern Africa and Australia, to investigate cognitive complexity and prehistoric social life through analyses of prehistoric rock art (see Rock Art). This particular ‘archaeology of mind’ approach is best exemplified by the works of David Lewis-Williams, who has applied his extensive work on southern Africa San cosmology and ritual practice to an analysis of European Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings. In particular, Lewis-Williams’ work explores how certain experiences, and entoptic or exaggerated images created or experienced in altered states or hallucinations during shamanistic trances are the product of universals in human neurology. Further, he explores how shaman-istic experiences may both account for the location of particular pictoral panels and explain the nature of the relationship between the maker and cave topography. Additionally, the extent to which shamanistic practice forged particular understandings of consciousness and subjectivity particular to communities in this period is addressed in his work.
Some of the cognitive-processual work described above has parallels with, or is in part inspired by, a variety of contemporary approaches to the evolutionary psychology of religion exemplified by Pascal Boyer, Robert McCauley, Daniel Dennett, and others. Contrary to intellectualist, Marxist, or symbolist approaches to religion, much of this work, which is neo-Darwinist in orientation, has dismissed religious definitions and explanations that center on emotional responses, irrational concepts, concerns about mortality, social coherence and representation, or particular beliefs, in favor of sophisticated functionalist analyses that focus on the developmental, cognitive mechanisms that make religious thought possible, attractive, and beneficial for human social groups. Arguing that religion has a limited number of traits or characteristics, the study of the emergence and persistence of such elements, along with other things like language (understood as ‘memes’), becomes a complex analysis of long-term cultural selection. Given the recent growth and popularity of neo-Darwinist approaches in archaeology, it is likely that approaches to religion, ritual, and ideology that adopt a selectionist perspective will become more visible in the discipline.
World History
