Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Everything Said About It Is an Inference

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Everything Said About It Is an Inference

No Neolithic person left a statement of belief, so every religious claim about the period is read off objects. That is worth saying at the front of any account, because Neolithic religion has attracted more confident reconstruction than almost any other subject in prehistory. Figurines have been interpreted as goddesses, as toys, as portraits and as teaching aids; burials have been read as ancestor cult, as status display and as practical disposal; alignments have been read as calendars, as theology and as coincidence.

Bioarchaeological work at Catalhoyuk by Clark Spencer Larsen and colleagues shows what a rigorous approach can actually establish, which is a great deal about health, diet, mobility and labour, and rather less about what anyone thought. The period is also not a period in the ordinary sense. It is defined by a way of living, farming with polished stone tools and without metal, so it begins and ends thousands of years apart in different regions, and a date range for it is only meaningful once a region is specified. The atlas gives a wide range and says so plainly, rather than implying a single global era with a single religion in it. What is catalogued under the Neolithic here should be read the same way: they are contemporaneous only in the loosest sense, and a monument in Anatolia and a monument in Orkney belong to societies that had no contact with each other and no reason to think alike.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.