Cult in Context

Reconsidering Ritual in Archaeology

Caroline Malone, David Barrowclough, David Barrowclough

• Verlag: Oxbow Books
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781782974963
• Thema: History
• Thema: Ancient History

Gods, deities, symbolism, deposition, cosmology and intentionality are all features of the study of early ritual and cult. Archaeology has great difficulties in providing satisfactory interpretation or recognition of these elusive but important parts of ancient society, and methodologies are often poorly equipped to explore the evidence. This collection of papers explores a wide range of prehistoric and early historic archaeological contexts from Britain, Europe and beyond, where monuments, architectural structures, megaliths, art, caves, ritual activity and symbolic remains offer exciting glimpses into ancient belief systems and cult behaviour. Different theoretical and practical approaches are demonstrated, offering both new directions and considered conclusions to the many problems of studying the archaeology of cult and ritual. Central to the volume is an exploration of early Malta and its intriguing Temple Culture, set in a broad perspective by the discussion and theoretical approaches presented in different geographical and chronological contexts.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Caroline Malone, David A. Barrowclough and Simon Stoddart

Religion is the frozen thought of men, out of which they build temples. Jiddu Krishnamurti 1928

God is as myghtye in the stable as in the temple. Thomas More 1529

Introduction

This volume arose out of a conference held at Magdalene College, Cambridge in December 2006. The meeting of more than a hundred participants and over forty contributors was made possible by the award of a research grant from the Templeton Foundation within a wider programme of investigation entitled ‘Becoming Fully Human: Social Complexity and Human Engagement with the Natural and Supernatural World’. Our specific project was entitled ‘Explorations into the conditions of spiritual creativity in Prehistoric Malta’ and focused on the ritual, art and architecture of that Mediterranean archipelago.

In designing our research proposal, we were acutely aware that our interpretation of the Maltese evidence for religious ritual was part of a wider archaeological endeavour aimed at developing a contextual methodology for understanding religion and cult through material culture. It was therefore appropriate that at the centre of our project lay an interdisciplinary conference which brought together not only other scholars engaged in research on Malta and the Mediterranean, but also those working elsewhere that shared our central concern of putting Cult in Context.

The aim was to set our work in the wider context of current archaeological research, to assess theory and method, and to enrich and exchange the interpretations that we had of one cultural context with the ideas of many others. The outcome is this collection of studies and discussions which demonstrate the vigour and interest in how a contextual archaeology investigates the challenging subjects of ritual, religion and cult. The results as seen in the following pages, is a wealth of material and approaches that tackle a variety of different concerns about how cult and ritual can be recognised, recovered, interpreted and understood.

It might be wise to start with a definition of what is meant by these terms so that the interpretations of them that follow build on some essential understanding. This is the approach adopted in several of the papers that follow. Colin Renfrew more particularly addresses the central concern of how we define ritual, cult and religion, revisiting his earlier work (1985; 1994). If we define religion as systems of notions about the supernatural and the sacred, about life after death and related themes, then rituals are the social processes which give a concrete expression to these notions (cf. Morley, this volume). Very generally, we may suggest that rituals are rule-bound often public events which in some way or other thematise the relationship between the earthly and the spiritual realms.

Ritual is important because it is a synthesis of several levels of social reality: the symbolic and the social, the individual and the collective; and it usually brings out, and tries to resolve, at a symbolic level, contradictions in society. One major contradiction, that between life and death, is addressed almost universally by religion. Many peoples have notions about an after-life, which represent an idealised version of life here and now, devoid of its problems and frustrations. Notions of the afterlife can give an impression of continuity and serve to demystify death. These notions translate into a universal interest in the cycle of life whose interpretation can vary to a considerable degree cross-culturally (Bradley, Stoddart, this volume).

Many non-literate societies pay great attention to ancestors and ancestral spirits. This focus clearly deals with the problem of continuity, both in society and in the individual lifespan, when a life is suddenly stopped. In an article on ancestral cults in Africa, Kopytoff (1971) observed that there is not necessarily a sharp distinction between living humans and ancestral spirits. The living become wiser, ‘drier’ and less mobile the older they become; the ancestors are thus perceived as extremely wise, dry and immobile persons. There is no rigid boundary between life and death in this scheme, rather a gradual transition to another phase, which begins long before death.

Cult may be defined as ‘a particular form of religious worship that implies devotion to a particular person or thing’ and the variety of cult is explored in a number of papers. Some papers focus on cults which relate the living and the dead (Barrowclough, Drag, Naumov, Stoddart, this volume); one paper introduces the cult of fire (Gheorghiu this volume) and another that of the severed human head (Ralph, this volume). Two other papers, having distinguished cult from other forms of religious activity, take our reconsideration of definitions onto a another stage with analysis of totems, ancestors and animism (Insoll, this volume; and also Janik, this volume). Once again, what appear familiar and straightforward terms, when analysed, take on a complexity of their own. The conclusion is that the interpretation of such terms in the singular is ‘flawed and instead interpretive plurality is required’ (Insoll, this volume).

This brings us neatly to discussion of context. Like ritual, religion and cult, context is a word frequently applied to the archaeological record, often uncritically. In a volume dedicated to Cult in Context it is worthwhile considering the implications of context as specifically applied to archaeological investigation of the numinous. The use of symbols (including material culture) is central to religious cult rituals. Studies of ritual symbols must therefore not merely investigate which symbols (artefacts) are being used, but must also look into their mutual relationship and their meaning.

Context is important because symbols are polysemic. Contrary to the work of Durkheim (1965 [1912]) and Malinowski (1966 [1935]; 1974 [1948]), Leach (1954) shows that rituals positively encourage instability within society, since they offer themselves to conflicting interpretations. It was Turner (1967) who identified how symbols can be multivocal, where several meanings can be read into a symbol. The major insight in Turner’s work is that symbols have to be multivocal or ambiguous in order to create solidarity, and since people are different, the symbols must be capable of meaning different things to different people. Maurice Bloch asserted that ‘rituals are events that combine the properties of statements and actions. It is because of this combination that their analysis has proved endlessly elusive’ (Bloch 1986, 181) shows this inherent complexity that makes archaeological interpretation so challenging and explains why context must be at the heart of our study.

The precise context, be it a cave, a mountainside, a building or a domestic shrine, and its intrinsic sense of place within the wider environment, is where the archaeological exploration of ritual begins. This context of ritual activity, the arena in which action was played out, where offering, veneration, display and ceremony were focused, surely holds structural, material and spatial clues to past activity that has potential still to inform and enlighten modern inquiry.

For far too long, the notion that the place of ancient ritual should be the primary focus of attention has been overshadowed by the dominance of the study of ritual art and image. This approach has been with archaeology ever since objects began to be seen as important indicators of culture, chronology, style and technology over a century ago. The many catalogues of so-called ‘ritual objects’, figurines, offering bowls, etc. that fill library shelves, are invariably objects out of context, and rarely re-connected with their archaeological association or findspot. The result has been a dominance of object type over its relationship with what made it meaningful in the first place. Such objects have been re-described, reformatted and re-valued into something quite different, as indeed, have sacred pictures hanging in art museums, or objects displayed in rows in glass cases. Decontextualised, such material has little hope of informing us about what role it played in the rituals and cult beliefs of early religion unless described in contemporary literary sources.

The combination of place, context and its related paraphernalia has rarely been tackled as the genuine evidence of religion, although this logical approach should have been the fundamental starting point for archaeology. New archaeological work has the benefit of hindsight, so that current projects (for example Çatalhöyük–Hodder 2006) have set out explicitly with the aspiration of discovering context furnished with ritual material. But all is not lost, studies of old records, revisited sites, systematic studies of symbols, place and context can reignite understanding and show us aspects of early belief systems and the cults and rituals that were played out in at sites. There is much that the archive can offer (Barrowclough, Anderson and Stoddart, this volume.

Over the last twenty-five years post-processual archaeology, liberated from concerns with chronology and other fundamental knowledge of the past, has become increasingly interested in reaching beyond the obvious and descriptive, and exploring the symbolic and cognitive dimensions of past societies. It has become important within the scholastic environment, as well as in popular archaeological presentation to show people of the past as thinking creative communities, with beliefs and values that echo aspects of our own, regardless of their chronological remoteness. Constrained by archaeological methods and resources, most archaeologists have tended to emphasise, the extremes, the micro or the macro scale of context, from the individual pit or artefact to the entire landscape, which appear to be definable aspects that reveal the past. This approach is often at the expense of understanding or even acknowledging the actual site and its structure and layout. These days it is less common to consider the actual site and its many component parts and instead to consider the whole landscape of Stonehenge, for example, or to identify ritual deposits in a ditch terminal. Neither extreme of scale truly presents sufficient context of cult practice and ritual behaviour to take us further. Some of the studies presented here (in particular, Goseck–Biehl; Stonehenge–Darvill; Malta–Malone, Barrowclough, Stroud, and Grima; the Sweet Track–Bond) focus on this elementary contextual relationship between setting, site and individual contexts showing that even well-known material still has much to explore, by exploring linkage.

Defining and recognising convincing ritual context has often been problematic given the fragmentary nature of much archaeology, so rarely has an understanding of space and place been considered together with material objects and images. Emphasis on one has often distorted the value or association of the other. Rather than an integrated and holistic approach to the archaeological cult context in its entirety (as might be expected for the study of a ‘traditional’ society where ritual is embedded within all aspects of life), researchers have tended to separate or conflate the components that survive from a once rich cosmological and ceremonial environment. The results for prehistory have been inadequate or extreme, with scholars either playing down the possibilities of accessing the spiritual and ceremonial world, or overplaying the interpretation of isolated elements, be they ‘structured depositions’, figurines, sacrifices, altars or whatever, into an amalgam of uninformed discourse. This volume explores how contextual archaeologists are approaching the task of interpreting ritual and cult in the archaeological record by re-establishing integration.

Caves, landscapes, seascapes and mountain peaks provide special arenas for experience and sensation, some of which are influenced by seasonal or diurnal changes of light and atmosphere, making certain contexts special places for cult. Several papers (Whitehouse, Skeates, Bradley, Tilley, Peatfield, Haysom, Grima, Aldenderfer, and Bond, this volume) explore the experience that particular types of context have on provoking ritual and cult responses. Issues about death (Ralph, this volume), territory (Grima, this volume), cosmology (Bond, this volume) and the workings of the human brain (Malafouris, this volume) provide much stimulus for discussion. The influence of catastrophic change in the environment and the resulting impact on societies has often been used to explain extreme or unexpected cult expression. Two papers address this contentious topic through investigations of drought (Moyes, this volume) and comets (McCafferty, this volume), and the possible impact these may have had on already marginal societies, resulting in cultic responses.

Malta provides one of the best documented cases of prehistoric ritual (Figure 1.1). A core group of papers investigates the development and change of prehistoric and later ritual and cult within this specific context. The studies include a review of the antecedents of pre-temple ritual (Trump, this volume) and a deconstruction of the speculation about the origins of the label ‘Temple’ (Stroud, this volume). Explorations of how the temples may have functioned as ritual space are a principal focus of two papers (Malone; Anderson and Stoddart, this volume) which demonstrate how old records, when combined with new methodologies, allow us to formulate new interpretations of built spaces. Precise spatially contextualised mortuary data from the Maltese islands, reported in detail elsewhere (Malone et al. 2007), are placed in the scaled temporal contexts of the cycle of life (Stoddart, this volume), alerting us to the importance of temporal as much as spatial context.

One of the central problems that face archaeologists when working with artefacts and sites excavated before the advent of scientific archaeology is the de-contextualisation of one from another, which sometimes re-examination of records can illuminate. In the case of the Maltese Temples at Tarxien it has been possible to re-contextualise site and artefact thanks to the careful recording of the early twentieth century excavations by their director Themistocles Zammit. Using the Zammit diaries it is possible to generate new insights into where reliefs, figurines and portable objects were placed in the temple and to see their relationship to one another, from which an understanding of their role may be proposed (Malone et al. in prep).

Three papers anticipate this work by employing archival material from the 1920s and 1930s. The first has reinterpreted the deposition of miniature greenstone axes within the Temple, and offers a detailed pilot study of the potential (Barrowclough, this volume). The second makes a first assessment of the visibility and accessibility of artefacts from the perspective of the celebrants (Anderson and Stoddart, this volume). Old records and new ideas thus provide enlightenment in long abandoned material. This is a theme very much in keeping with a further paper which introduces us to the ‘lost’ archive of Italian archaeologist Luigi Ugolini who had proposed, as long ago as the early 1930s, to attempt to study the artefacts excavated from the Maltese Temples in the context of those structures (Vella, this volume). Events prevented the completion of these scholars’ work which is only now being attempted once again.

Precise spatial context is not everything. Broader social context is equally important. One of the Maltese papers (Townsend, this volume) focuses on a particular social class of artefact, the Maltese figurines, exploring the depiction of obesity and leading the author to speculate on what the significance of this might have been. Figurative art on Malta and elsewhere, as presented in the conference, provided an important linking theme for this paper.

It is easy for the prehistoric period to dominate interpretations of Maltese archaeology. Little linkage or chronological consideration has been given before to the ritual world of later Malta, but papers here addressed both the later prehistoric and Phoenician ritual landscape (Bonanno, this volume), and the adaptation of Jewish ritual to Roman Malta (Drag, this volume). These two papers show how ritual landscapes are palimpsets of monu...