RE: Question: ancient burials.
April 21, 2019 at 9:24 am
(This post was last modified: April 21, 2019 at 9:42 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Really depends on what you're looking for. The earliest evidence of people throwing the dead into holes in the ground is alot older than the line archaeologists and anthropologists draw for burials.
Conveniently, it's the line -between- archaeology and anthropology. As disposal of bodies is a practical matter for human settlement, whereas burial is a cultural artifact. The clearest evidence for burial as opposed to disposal comes from the paleolithic, particularly in the use of red ochre. We've been doing it for at least 100k years. Give or take 30k more for a few neanderthal sites and how long it took for the practice to become ubiquitous.
As far as we can tell, this was the beginning of religion, lol. The connection between death, dreaming, sleeping, needing, living and the otherworld was all established here. This expressed itself in ways that we can find, today, in burial rituals that became increasingly elaborate and started to give us a glimpse into social orders and relative levels of material wealth between societies and between individuals in societies - though, what those relative measures mean in the specifics is widely open to interpretation. We don't know, for example, what level of present pain the living where willing to inflict on themselves on account of the dead. If we find an adorned gravesite we can know that great care was taken in the moment of ritual, and we might posit that whomever was buried was well loved and well off - but they might be hated members of a high social rank in a tribe with meager resources. Some sites were looted relatively soon after their completion. We don't know if the sites were marked, in the beginning, either, so it may have been a sendoff for closure that nobody gave much thought to after the fact. By the neolithic there's a clearer picture, mostly due to there being more people, and more sites. Burial, and broadly, death...had become the central focus of religious life. So it remains to this day, as a simple matter of classification, all of the worlds major religions are forms of a death cult.
(yes, lol, even buddhism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_religion
Conveniently, it's the line -between- archaeology and anthropology. As disposal of bodies is a practical matter for human settlement, whereas burial is a cultural artifact. The clearest evidence for burial as opposed to disposal comes from the paleolithic, particularly in the use of red ochre. We've been doing it for at least 100k years. Give or take 30k more for a few neanderthal sites and how long it took for the practice to become ubiquitous.
As far as we can tell, this was the beginning of religion, lol. The connection between death, dreaming, sleeping, needing, living and the otherworld was all established here. This expressed itself in ways that we can find, today, in burial rituals that became increasingly elaborate and started to give us a glimpse into social orders and relative levels of material wealth between societies and between individuals in societies - though, what those relative measures mean in the specifics is widely open to interpretation. We don't know, for example, what level of present pain the living where willing to inflict on themselves on account of the dead. If we find an adorned gravesite we can know that great care was taken in the moment of ritual, and we might posit that whomever was buried was well loved and well off - but they might be hated members of a high social rank in a tribe with meager resources. Some sites were looted relatively soon after their completion. We don't know if the sites were marked, in the beginning, either, so it may have been a sendoff for closure that nobody gave much thought to after the fact. By the neolithic there's a clearer picture, mostly due to there being more people, and more sites. Burial, and broadly, death...had become the central focus of religious life. So it remains to this day, as a simple matter of classification, all of the worlds major religions are forms of a death cult.
(yes, lol, even buddhism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_religion
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