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Everything is Ritual! - Ep 8
310 Plays6 years ago
When identifying ritual, context is everything. In the case of zooarchaeology, the location of the remains alone has much inference on whether ritual activity is involved. A notable example is perhaps the burial of dogs (or parts thereof) at the threshold of a structure, which is seen from the Neolithic down to Iron Age, from Italy to Kazakhstan, through Sweden and Britain.
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeo Animals Podcast
00:00:16
Speaker
The void embraced, ripped from reality, and placed the cold feet of the Mother Spirit. Skull of my mentor, whom toiled in the field, blown, bone of small tooth, made thee wield. Distal portion, twisted neck, rend down the dog into foul mess.
00:00:21
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:44
Speaker
Picking from the froth, beings made of froth, to angels of bone, Simona and Alex, welcome to their own.
00:01:12
Speaker
It is another episode of Archaeo Animals. As always, I'm Alex Fitzpatrick, and with me, Simona Falanga.
Defining Ritual in Archaeology
00:01:21
Speaker
And today we are talking about something that we've managed to mention in every episode of this podcast so far. We're talking about ritual. Simona, how excited are you? Are you okay?
00:01:42
Speaker
Okay. So I think the best way to start off is to talk about what actually is ritual, which, you know, confounds archaeologists till this day, if we're going to be really honest.
00:01:58
Speaker
could be an entire episode in its own right. Just what is ritual? So you kind of have the idea of ritual as this running joke in archaeology. If you don't know, if you're not in the field, the running joke is that if you don't understand something, if you look at a site, you don't know what it's there for. Just say it's ritual, and it takes care of everything because ritual can be anything. Simona, do you want to explain what ritual actually is or, you know, kind of the agreed upon definition for now?
00:02:28
Speaker
where things are just ritual, like really, it depends whom you ask. You know, you can see ritual, so this system of beliefs and behavior that work together. And I guess the key here is systematic action, so something that's performed over and over again with a specific intent in mind. But then again, I could be saying that about me brushing my teeth in the morning. Yeah. So that's also not very helpful.
00:02:52
Speaker
I mean, we also do like modern day, we do call that kind of stuff rituals and like your morning ritual and stuff like that. So it gets a little convoluted. So we have probably the definition that we'll be using in this episode is that it's the idea of that beliefs and behaviors when they work together, and they function together. In a very specific way, that's a ritual. So it's kind of like the action, acting upon those beliefs and stuff.
00:03:20
Speaker
That sounds about right, yes. So I guess really, for all intents and purposes, it is sort of a structured, repetitive action, but I guess with a religious sphere in mind. Yeah, but you know, with that in mind, if, you know, we already can't really decide on a definition of ritual within archaeology, I guess the next question is then how do we even
00:03:45
Speaker
know we're looking at ritual, because again, everything can be ritual, then anything from, you know, a couple of bodies to a couple of stones could be ritual.
Special Deposits and Ritual Significance
00:03:56
Speaker
So, with zoarchaeology, it's a little bit different. We have something called, well, it used to be called special deposits, and now they're referred to as associated bone groups. I always thought that was just animal bone groups.
00:04:12
Speaker
Oh, really? Yeah, no, they're associative bone groups. Okay. Wait, unless I'm wrong. No, I'm probably wrong. I've read in text, I've read it as associative bone groups. So unless there's a schism within the zoo archaeology community where we're fighting over that as well.
00:04:34
Speaker
It's funny because I've always seen it as the acronym, like ABGs are the animal bone group. Sure. To be fair, yeah, it does make more sense because you really only use the acronym ABGs when you're talking about animal bones. But yeah, so the idea that they're associated bone groups is that they're all in one context. They were all probably laid out together. And that's where the kind of ritual aspect of it gets into place.
00:05:02
Speaker
So at the end of the day, when we talk about archaeology, it just all comes down to context. Context is everything. Context. Have that as a jingle. Yeah. Well, we need to get a sound board where push a button and it goes context.
00:05:21
Speaker
Anyway, so any other things you want to talk about in terms of how we can pinpoint ritual? Although let's be real, it's way, way more complicated than that. I don't know, just like thinking a couple of things off the top of my head. For example, if you're using animal skulls as part of your ritual, and then you're just carefully depositing them,
00:05:47
Speaker
somewhere, say you're closing a water deposit or putting them under the floorboards of your house or something, chances are you would have probably kept those bones away from animals that would have gnawed and chewed on it. Because if you assign it any sort of special significance, you perhaps wouldn't leave them out for the dog? Yeah, probably not. Although maybe there is a ritual in the past where you do actually give your bones to the dog.
00:06:17
Speaker
We don't know. Okay, you know, just going post procession. Yeah, I know. Well, that's the thing about ritual. You can go into circles with those, you know. I mean, so like, literally, with how do I identify like, an ritual with animal bones? Actually, you don't, it's just, there is no evidence to prove that it wasn't ritual. Therefore, it must be ritual. I mean, realistically, that's the whole thing about archaeology. We really can't necessarily prove any of this stuff. So I just, I think I just had an existential crisis.
00:06:48
Speaker
right back up all archaeologists go home archaeology's over we're done it was nice it was good right it was good right don't don't get too excited but yeah um yeah post-percessional is the only archaeology that should exist where are my post-perfessionals i mean precessionals i'm
00:07:10
Speaker
Yeah, um fire gun all cylinders guys But yeah, I mean the lack of nah marks definitely can be an indicator I mean you are right like for the most part I think we can all agree is that if you were taking bones and using them in a ritual you
00:07:26
Speaker
you probably wouldn't leave them anywhere, like just anywhere, you would probably have a certain place for it, like very certain types of locations, things like that.
Animal Bones as Ritual Indicators
00:07:37
Speaker
Like thresholds, thresholds are like the thing for rituals, isn't it? Merle Well, that's the one thing that I was going to mention again, like, going on from context, being very important, it's like, you know, if you find a dog skeleton,
00:07:53
Speaker
anywhere on site. It's a dog that died and someone buried. I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be a ritual, for all you know, that dog could have been actually eaten or skin for fur and people wouldn't have necessarily assigned any sort of significance to the dog dying. But then if you find said dog at the threshold of a building, that takes a whole different meaning entirely.
00:08:16
Speaker
because it's something that we do see quite a lot and actually spanning all sorts of geographical regions and time periods because we're looking at the Neolithic in Italy and Kazakhstan and in Sweden during the Bronze Age and even like in Iron Age Britain, you do sort of systematically find dogs associated with thresholds of buildings. So of course, yeah, your dog skull and your waist bit, just some dog that died was processed for whatever reason and then just tossed in there.
00:08:44
Speaker
dogs call the threshold of a building, different meaning entirely. Yeah. So and then of course, you know, there's the whole like, interpretations that have been made for dog remains within thresholds. And like, maybe because it has something to do with how dogs are associated with being guardians of the underworld or embodiments of loyalty. But that we don't necessarily know for sure, because cultures that have left us a written record, that we might be able to argue that.
00:09:11
Speaker
But for some prehistoric cultures, that's just us using our own bias, because in a way, that's how we view dogs today, so the symbol of loyalty. So that would be us sort of applying our concept of dogs to other cultures, which doesn't necessarily work.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's like one of the key issues with ritual is that ritual itself is so experiential that a lot of aspects of it we really can't understand because you really have to
00:09:45
Speaker
you really have to be in the moment. If you see these dog bones placed at the threshold of settlements or enclosures or something, we can at least see that archeologically, but there's so many other aspects of this assumed ritual that we'll never find because we just weren't there, we don't have that kind of experience.
00:10:07
Speaker
Because I think you'll never really know why they did it. I mean, you can speculate, but you'll never really know. So again, like with the Iron Age of Britain, you can look at the written record. Of course, the Iron Age populations didn't really leave a written record. So you could go off what the Romans have written. But what the Romans passed down to us is inherently biased. So you got to take them with a pinch of salt as well. So you can't trust anyone. That's what we're trying to say. In archaeology, you just can't trust anyone.
00:10:35
Speaker
Again, like, pack up, go home. Oh man, that's a really pessimistic episode.
00:10:42
Speaker
But yeah, no, I mean, that's the other thing about ritual as well is that, you know, the way you look at it, even if we do agree that we can't necessarily truly understand what they were seeing and what they were feeling, what they were thinking when they're doing their rituals, there's some aspects of it that we can at least pull out a bit and kind of see, you know, what was in what was important to people in the past, you know, what
00:11:10
Speaker
What were they trying to do?
Purpose and Interpretation of Rituals
00:11:12
Speaker
Because that's the other thing with rituals. There's something very, what's the word? They're being utilized for some reason. They're being applied for some reason. Why are they doing these rituals? It's always something usually that's kind of out of their control.
00:11:27
Speaker
But it is interesting how you talk about ritual in terms of dealing with things that people can't actually change, where we imagine ritual as being something you do every day because you want to do it.
00:11:43
Speaker
You know, like, I think the question really is when we colloquially talk about ritual, there is a kind of a difference between that kind of ritual as in you do something for a specific reason and it's kind of like it's ingrained in you and you have to do it almost with what seems to be an archaeology ritual is something where we can't really have a material
00:12:09
Speaker
based reason for doing it. I feel that sometimes ritual comes out of a space where processional archaeology tried to look at a resource management perspective of history, how far it is here, and how much energy was expended.
00:12:28
Speaker
And therefore, ritual was a way of kind of, oh, well, if it doesn't fit into this narrow perspective of these resources cost this much calories to go, and I have to go this many kilometers to come back, you know, what am I going to actually get? That's where ritual kind of fits in. And I think that's why ritual, to me, is not very
00:12:50
Speaker
subversive, it's not very interesting in archaeology if it's just used in this way. I think it's far more interesting to use it to actually evaluate how ineffective we are at talking about
00:13:07
Speaker
very deep pasts. And I think, you know, there was that ladder rung thing where it's like, further up the ladder is where you can describe more abstract concepts from the material that you have, and somebody put the ladder around. I can't remember what that is. But it's difficult
00:13:29
Speaker
in reality to infer these belief systems from the materiality. And that's something that's really important when we are talking about ritual. I'll pass it back over
00:13:39
Speaker
I mean, if you just want the trash on my PhD research, you're going to just told me. Oh, right. Okay. This is, is this because I know that actually I agree with you because I mean, I'll talk about this a little bit later in the episode, at least specifics, but what I'm finding as someone who's specifically doing a whole PhD on kind of extrapolating ritual or, you know,
00:14:03
Speaker
whether or not it is indeed ritual from animal bones, from a huge assortment of animal bones, is that, yeah, it is a lot trickier and it really highlights the kind of limitations of archaeology, in particular zoo archaeology, you know, it's what, when you have all these animal bones and you can't really say they're natural deposits and you, but you can say that they were, most of them were anthropologically, you know, put there, but you don't have any other information on it, you know, what can you say?
Rituals: From Wild to Domestic Settings
00:14:32
Speaker
That's kind of just what's kind of happening in my research. So I agree with you. I just like to complain about it. You know, place and location is actually often what we use to kind of justify a ritual. I know there's quite a few good examples of that where ritual is because of place. I don't know if you had any examples. I mean, again, my research is actually, you know, I do caves, so.
00:14:59
Speaker
I honestly haven't been reading any of your research stuff. Cool. Great. No, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. You know, whatever. Your research is special. Your research is special. Don't worry. Hey, the APN is looking for a new producer. You can't fire me on live on your own podcast. Oh dear. Persimona has been sitting here listening to us the whole time. Simona, please rescue this episode. No pressure though.
00:15:27
Speaker
So what can we learn from ritual bones about past belief systems? Everything and nothing. That's what we basically learned from this episode.
00:15:39
Speaker
It's confusing. No, that's the thing though. Even though we're all doing bits on bits, it is really confusing and I think this just highlights it. Ritual can be a very tricky subject because it can be so easily misused in archaeological interpretation.
00:16:00
Speaker
everything and nothing. And actually one point that was especially keen on making is that of course if you're trying to reconstruct the ritual belief system of a population that has not left a written record behind, what archaeologists in general tend to do is just go off the ethnographic record and see what populations today are doing
00:16:21
Speaker
But that's a whole other kind of worms in a way, because it's something that is very interesting, but also quite dangerous to use. And I think we'll be talking more about that after the break. So while we have it here, we just want to talk real quick about memberships. So the Archaeology Podcasting Network has a three tier membership structure system.
00:16:46
Speaker
I don't know what the right word is to use there. For as low as $5 a month, you can become a member and help support editing costs and hosting costs. And what you get from it is you get freebies sent to you every month. You get behind the scenes content. You can join our Slack and yell at us for being wrong about things if you want. So yeah, I mean,
00:17:15
Speaker
Be cool. Can't send you any chickens, unfortunately. But, you know, maybe one day. And we're back. We are talking about ritual this episode and going off into very abstract, very conceptual kind of stuff, because that's what ritual is.
00:17:35
Speaker
And I think I was about to go on a tangent about overusing ethnography in trying to interpret archaeological ritual. Yeah, that is true. I mean, it makes sense why we would turn to ethnography. And I think in some cases, it does work. But yeah, like, you're right, there is definitely
00:17:56
Speaker
a danger of overusing it. It is something very interesting to use and to read about by all means, but it makes some pretty big assumption saying, oh, so this prehistoric culture in what is now Iraq, used to do something in this particular way. And we think it's for X reason, because there's this one culture in Zimbabwe, that does something similar.
00:18:22
Speaker
if you know what I mean yeah no there's um yeah there's a lot of dangers in kind of just you know
00:18:28
Speaker
mix, like, you know, mix and matching cultures, you know, just because someone does it here, you can't necessarily extrapolate that over to the other side of the world and say, no, they probably do it. Yeah. And also sort of using present the present day sort of record to interpret prehistory, you're making the big assumption that that culture that you're looking at has remained unchanged for 2000 years. Yeah, well, trust me, they probably think they haven't.
00:18:56
Speaker
Another danger that I find, especially when it comes to animals, is kind of conflating ritual and feasting. Sometimes they can be one the same, let's be real, there's a lot of ritual feasting that goes on. A lot of times when you find animal bones that have been, you know, butchered and cooked and everything among more funerary contexts, a lot of times
00:19:19
Speaker
the interpretation is all they were having some kind of funerary feast, things like that. But I think there's also a slight danger in conflating in the two, because of course not every feast is going to be a ritual feast. Merle Sometimes sometimes you just got to have a barbecue. Sarah Yeah, I know. I could go for a barbecue right now. Merle And again, depending on which way you look at it, that that is pretty ritual. Sarah Yeah, that is true. Oh, gosh, we're really just going in circles and stuff.
00:19:47
Speaker
that's ritual for you. I think that's probably like, if you leave with anything from this episode, is that yeah, rituals just one big circle, you could argue about it for 10,000 years. But then again, we are archaeologists and I am an admin believer that the collective noun for archaeologists should be an argument of archaeologists.
00:20:10
Speaker
Speaking of feasting though, we should also talk about the fact that when it comes to animals or ritual, there are some kinds of animals that I guess signify that maybe there's something, I hate to say this, but ritual-y, ritual-y going on there, especially between domestic animals and wild animals, so Simona.
Spaces of Ritual: Separate or Overlapping?
00:20:35
Speaker
Well, okay, so there's this whole big, when we talk about ritual in general with archaeology, there's a bit of a maybe debate, I guess, on this idea of, you know, is a ritual area, is a place used for ritual, is that always going to be separated from the domestic sphere?
00:20:54
Speaker
will they always be two separate things in the sense that you know churches and houses are two different things or you know do they ever kind of coincide and become one sphere? So there's a lot of talk about that and something that I know from working in like the later prehistoric period was that there seems to be kind of a shift
00:21:17
Speaker
So in the elyphic you get more ritual e places that are more in wild areas natural areas and then it's slowly as we get into the iron age seems to go more into domestic there's more ritual
00:21:32
Speaker
things in settlements and stuff like that. But I think there's still this kind of like, association with wild and natural things that we tend to make with ritual in archaeology.
00:21:50
Speaker
certain depictions, say like in rock art, you have a shift. For example, if you look at Scandinavian rock art, a lot of which is found like wood. It's found all over Scandinavia really, but the parts I think I'm particularly referring to is all the rock art found in Alta, just sort of like in Arctic Norway. And you see a shift because they've been going
00:22:14
Speaker
like this rock art stayed back to thousands of years and again for thousands of years they were being drawn or carved really on rocks but you do see what is being depicted shift because you do have sort of wildlife which is sort of omnipresent so you do get different species of deer and reindeer depicted but while in the earlier phases you see a lot of hunting scenes and boats
00:22:38
Speaker
and sort of like move to more domestic scenes as you get to sort of the Bronze Age period. So I guess maybe sort of like that. Yeah, no, I mean, there's definitely something, I guess, going on there. And the thing, you know, it could be one the same, really. But it's kind of interesting to see that kind of shift taking place where, you know, again, as we like to say, everything is ritual. So even the domestic can be ritual, I guess.
00:23:07
Speaker
I guess the way you look at it is maybe because the shift of what is sacred, I'm just gonna beat myself up over this later, over what is sacred may have shifted over time because like, while before maybe you're solely relied on hunting and gathering. Of course, a lot of your ritual would be technically because again, we're just going on a massive speculation here, it would be like your ritual be finalized to saying having a good hunt.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah. Well, as you move towards the Neolithic and sort of later phases of prehistory, when sort of agriculture started to set in, of course, all your ritualistic actions would be perhaps more aimed at a successful harvest. Of course, your imagery changes and your places of worship changes. But now I've just realised that it's got nearly nothing to do with what you were saying, because it reverts to wide places in the Iron Age.
00:23:58
Speaker
It's just, there's no, it's just everything. I think that's what we're really just getting down to. It's everything. Ritual's everything. There's no way to really pinpoint what's ritual and what's not, and we should all give up.
00:24:14
Speaker
But what we can say is probably ritual at least is probably my favorite thing, which is combined deposits.
Human and Animal Burials
00:24:21
Speaker
I love human and animal burials. I think they're very interesting and cool and maybe I'm a little biased because that's exactly what I'm working on right now, but you know.
00:24:31
Speaker
It's cool, right? But then like, let's take some like a burial, say like the one of the human buried with their cat in Cyprus. Yeah, it was about 9000 years ago, give or take, if I remember correctly. But say that was just a person that was buried with their pet. Would that be a ritual? I mean, well, is do we consider funerary things rituals?
00:25:01
Speaker
like burial rites. I mean, yes, when you say so. And I guess in that particular example as well, it looked very much like the cat had been purposely killed and placed in the grave. Yeah. Which I'm sure the owner wouldn't have been overly keen on. They're like, please, if I die prematurely, do not kill my pets. Don't. Yeah, just crack me, crack me open and shove it in when it dies naturally in like five years.
00:25:26
Speaker
Oh no, I've got it all planned. I want to proper like shrine with like ancient Egyptian murals. That's for Bastet. That is representations of her and Kernenos and Sandy. That would be nice. So now you know.
00:25:40
Speaker
It's all over the web now. I will not be denied now. That's valid. It's been spoken out there. The thing about human animal burials is that it's also part of that ABGs thing we were talking about, associated bone groups. The fact that they were possibly buried together indicates that something
00:26:05
Speaker
perhaps different than the norm is happening. Another thing that I like about that kind of concept is the idea of talking about personhood and, you know, how do people in the past see animals versus how do they see them as humans? There's a lot of different sites, like Hornish Point, where they think that maybe some of these animals, because a lot of them are usually young, juvenile animals, where
00:26:34
Speaker
killed in sacrifice as a proxy for humans because of similar treatment of the bodies. And I just like all the weird philosophical questions you get in archaeology when you start going down this path.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah, there's like, it's one another interesting thing, and I really do hate to bring it back to the Romans. This just seems like seems to be all I know about. Just some recent studies that have been made looking specifically a Romano British cremations. I found that a lot of the sort of human cremations were actually mixed with animals. And so like some of the findings that seem like certain species tend to be associated more frequently with a particular sex.
00:27:18
Speaker
Oh, okay. So for instance, the majority of male cremation burials were associated with cattle remains, while women were associated with birds. Oh, that's interesting. Do you know what kind of birds in particular?
00:27:36
Speaker
I would have no idea. I'm not sure they managed to tell in the first place because anything sort of cremated and personal, it's completely out of my depth. That's incredibly valid. But I guess the idea that the fact, even if you can't really specify what kind of birds they are, the fact that they're actually being cremated is probably a red flag in terms of, you know, pay something different is going on here because we don't regularly cremate birds, I feel like. No, but it's like literally they were cremated.
00:28:06
Speaker
I'm not entirely sure like we cremated both at the same time like factors said that the urn would have contained the remains of both yeah the person and the animal so whether they just cremated the bird at a later date but i will toss that in there as well but hopefully not
00:28:25
Speaker
Well, I mean, I could also have different kind of signifiers, like probably the one kind of site that we really need a name drop in this episode when we're talking about stuff like ABGs and stuff is the dameberry pits in Britain, where they do have these mixed burials in pits where you would find
00:28:45
Speaker
bits of human remains, animal bones, and you also get some pottery, bits of iron, grain.
Danebury Pits and Ritual Speculations
00:28:53
Speaker
And so one of the things that archaeologists thought of when it came to interpretation is that maybe this has to do with fertility or regeneration rituals. So even though these are burials, and you could argue they're not necessarily ritual, it's the intention behind it, I guess.
00:29:12
Speaker
if any. Yeah, no, they could also be just tossing it, you don't know. I mean, I'm not speaking about like, Danebury per se, but also, because even with human burials, in a way, we are presuming that the population that we're looking at would have given the same sort of value to burying a person that we would have.
00:29:33
Speaker
Yeah. Because then you could be looking at some culture that actually think, oh no, once the person is dead, you know, it's just the remains, it actually doesn't matter because the spirit has gone off.
00:29:43
Speaker
wherever so the remains here, we'll just put them there. And I mean, I guess it's also a question of like, care how the remains treated if they're just kind of tossed willy-nilly, we'll be able to kind of see that in the archaeological record. But if they were actually cared for, like in Danbury, one of the things that they think happened to some of these remains is ex-carnation, which is basically the act of de-fleshing skeletons to eventually disarticulate them or you know,
00:30:12
Speaker
kind of take the bones apart so it's not just one whole skeleton, it's just a pile of bones. So it could be done manual, so a lot of times you'll find like cut marks on the bones that's like specifically, you know, really careful kind of skinning to get the skin off. Over other times it's just natural, they like just leave them out for any kind of scavengers or just the weather to do it.
00:30:35
Speaker
And so what's this about a sky burial? I think it's something I read in the news a while ago that a tourist in Scotland had petitioned the Scottish government for him to have a sky burial on top of a mountain and Scotland was like, nope. How dare they? I want to have a sky burial.
00:31:02
Speaker
It's just because we've got an island called Skye up here in Scotland and we just don't want them all to be buried in that one island. That's what the problem is. You should have been very specific about what he meant by Skye burial. I mean, I want my remains tossed into my old pit in Orkney. What?
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, no, I mean like, really? As in, huh? No, I remember you mentioning on the last episode you were working up in the far reaches of the north of Scotland. It'll just be funny, you know?
00:31:37
Speaker
would you not want to be cremated, not take up more space? Because I want them to go to the site before the excavation team shows up for the summer's dig and then throw my body in there. So it's like a pleasant surprise. It's like opening up a Kinder Egg. No, I get that. But like, you know, when we talk about future burials, a lot of the time
00:31:58
Speaker
We talk about the need for being ecological with our burials.
Modern Burials Through Future Lenses
00:32:05
Speaker
I don't know how you guys feel about the ritual of either cremation or burial in a coffin. Do you think that perhaps these ideas of how people should be buried will represent something going forward as well? Do you think there's possibly some of the same kind of discussions about who should be cremated versus who should be
00:32:27
Speaker
Buried occurring in the past as well i mean i think definitely i know that you know you see kind of the kind of ideas of social status in the ways that you know kind of burial plots in the past have been laid out and in terms of more like.
00:32:48
Speaker
belief system wise. A lot of people who work in the later prehistoric in Britain believe that the idea of exclination of kind of disarticulating the skeleton after death is very similar to say if someone buries
00:33:04
Speaker
a sword in the grave, they usually break it. So that's kind of a symbolic thing, things like that, you know, there's definitely something. Well, because I think religion has a lot to play in it, because even if you look at the present day, until very recently, cremation was a no-no for the Roman Catholic Church.
00:33:23
Speaker
So it's just like, and you see, yeah, do you tend to see this sort of shift in the archaeological record as well? Because usually like, inhumation will make a comeback once a population turns Christian. So yeah, that's that's a what a pleasant way to end the segment, huh? Yeah. And now you know everything about our funeral arrangements. Yeah, toss me in a pit.
00:33:55
Speaker
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00:34:11
Speaker
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00:34:36
Speaker
All right, so we're back, and now it's everyone's favorite part of the episode, case studies.
Osteomancy: Divination with Bones
00:34:42
Speaker
So, Simona, I know you have a lot to talk about in terms of osteomancy and using astralid- astralid guy, astralid- I don't think I've ever said that word out loud.
00:34:56
Speaker
A straggly? Yeah, I've never said that loud. For those of you who are not aware of it, it is also my favourite bone and it looks a little bit like a toy car.
00:35:07
Speaker
It is very cute. It is. I do enjoy seeing them every so often. But why don't you take it away? Because I know how much you love this stuff. I suppose one of the things that I'm particularly interested in is, as you'd expect, the use of animal bones in both utilitarian and ritual functions aside from, you know, eating.
00:35:35
Speaker
And two things that particularly tickle my fancy for a reason or another, osteomancy and a straggle eye and how these turn up in the archaeological record. Now, osteomancy is a form of divination, so it's literally just using the bones to divine the future. This has been done for thousands of years. By some cultures, it's still practiced to this day.
00:35:58
Speaker
and often actually the bone that is more most often used is actually the scapula, so the shoulder blade. And in this particular instance, osteomancy would take the name of scapulimancy. But then again, I'm just going to blow you away once more. If there's any burning involved, because that's what
00:36:18
Speaker
We find sometimes in the archaeological record, that's again what some cultures do to these days, they divine the future by actually burning the scapula and then see sort of the pattern that the cracks make on the shoulder blade. And in that case, so like the running the future using a scapula or any bone by heat exposure is called pyromancy.
00:36:44
Speaker
about scapulae mancy, very first evidence that we get is in China about 5,300 before present. And it's what you may have heard of as the oracle bones. So they practiced pyromancy because what we found were for the most part heat exposed herbivore scapulae. And actually what's particularly cool about them is actually we find some of the first evidence of writing for that region, because they were actually writing down the interpretation of those cracks.
00:37:14
Speaker
on the scapula. So that's really cool. And for the most part, really, if you look sort of across time in geographical regions, herbivores do tend to be the most commonly used species. It might be because, I don't know, because they're slightly larger in general, because I don't think some more following between them and carnivores would make an awful lot of difference, just like maybe the canid and felidae ones are slightly more rounded off, but
00:37:39
Speaker
while the herbivores tend to be more squared off but other than that I don't really see much of a difference like how one would be more suitable than the other like other than size alone. Although other species are used and again if we go back at the ethnographic
00:37:56
Speaker
record. There are some cultures like in the northeast of Siberia, you have the Kodiak who use seal scapulae. An interesting thing about them specifically is that they use specifically seal scapulae because they wish to foresee the outcome of whaling expeditions. Why that's interesting is because it seems
00:38:16
Speaker
In certain cultures, it seems that a scapula of different species are used to predict different outcomes. Oh, that's cool. And that's something that you see with a stragolite as well, and I'll get to that in a minute. Just one quick point that I wanted to mention, sort of if you're interested in the subject at all, so if two museums to maybe like pop around and have a look at the Boss Castle Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall, and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford,
00:38:44
Speaker
because they do have a fair amount of both sort of contemporary and old material pertaining animal bone used in... Is magical ritual the right word? Divination. We'll just go with divination. That's ritual. I mean, magical routine things are ritual, I think.
00:39:07
Speaker
And now moving on to a straggle, I just said, you know, little toy cars. Because a straggle, I mean, they're not solely used for ritual purposes. I mean, a straggle is one of the first evidence that we have of dice.
00:39:23
Speaker
being used. Because again, if you look at herbivores, and that's more, much more so than carnivores, the morphology of it, where you have these, well, essentially, you have six sides. And if you do throw in a stragalus around, it will land much like, what's the singular for dice? Die. Die? Oh, die. Yeah. Okay. Well, much like a die, it will land
00:39:50
Speaker
a particular side, so that's mostly how we do see it being used in the archaeological record. On some sites they have been argued to have been used as toys and that is very much the case, even like present day, I mean some populations still
00:40:09
Speaker
use Australia as toys to these days because again because of their dice sort of appearance it's a great way sort of like to play games to teach children how to count. Yeah try it at home.
00:40:24
Speaker
I must say I have tried it myself. I've tried to recreate because there's a Roman game called knuckle bones, which essentially a numerical value is assigned to each sort of side of the stragglers. So depending on when you toss it, and then you see how many points you got.
00:40:42
Speaker
But as I said, as toys, I mean, they have been used in Europe as well, up until very recently, because I was speaking to a friend of mine who's from the Basque country, and her grandparents used to use them as toys.
00:40:55
Speaker
specifically sheep are straggling. So it's something like, I haven't got a journal article that I can put in the ref because this is like 100% word of mouth. It is what I was told. But as I said, yeah, herbivore are straggling, lend themselves a lot better sort of for divination purposes as well.
00:41:14
Speaker
And divination or something similar has been argued for a Saxon burial in Britain. So in Washington, it was a cremation, but the cremation was associated with sort of around 30 sheep are straggling. So that was a thing. Again, ritualistic actions like why they've done that reasons. But again, sort of going on from the scapula, like you see the trend sort of with a straggle I
00:41:44
Speaker
that in some cultures, sort of a different species they use to predict different outcomes. So one example that I found in a book that's actually if you're interested in rituals, a very, very interesting title is called Social Zoo Archaeology by Larissa Russell. And it's a brilliant book. And they do go into the ethnographic record a lot, but nicely so.
00:42:09
Speaker
makes sense. It's a fascinating read. One example that was there, it was the thong of Mozambique, where they do practice divination using a stragulae, but they'll have different species to predict different outcomes. For example, if you throw the bones, I wonder whether that's actually where the term was originated from.
00:42:32
Speaker
you throw the bones and it's the straggly of sheep, then you'll be determining sort of the future for the chief and his family. And if you use goat instead, you'll be looking at the sort of the future of commoners. That's another thing. I do love stragglers. Like they're just so nice. And especially when they're like, you know, really well preserved and nice and round and they're just a great shaped bone. But the beautiful things that they
00:43:02
Speaker
often are because they're such a dense bowl that it's virtually destructible. Like in an excavation sort of scenario, you have to try real hard to break one of those. I mean, hats off if you do, because you've been doing it. It's like a rock. Basically, we have a lot in my assemblage, which speaking of, it's now time for me to talk on end about my work.
Cowsey Caves Research and Ritual
00:43:25
Speaker
Finally, my work matters.
00:43:28
Speaker
Anyway, so like we were talking about before, my research is on the Cowsey Caves, which are in Scotland, and they are pretty weird, basically. Like we were talking about with mixed assemblages of animal and human remains, that's basically all these caves.
00:43:53
Speaker
There's a lot of work that's been done on the human remains. There's a lot of really interesting stuff, like juvenile heads, skulls really, were placed at the entrance of one of the caves, the Sculptor's Cave.
00:44:09
Speaker
which was a whole big thing. So there's a lot of really interesting stuff being done with the human remains. But no one's really looked at the animal remains, so that's been my job for a while. And it's actually, it's been really interesting. I mean, you know, kind of comparing the two, especially because caves are such
00:44:29
Speaker
liminal weird spaces. So when people were looking at the human remains, one of their interpretations were that, you know, caves being this liminal space that's not really outside and it's not really in the ground either. And, you know, entrances and thresholds also being kind of a liminal space. The fact that we have juveniles
00:44:52
Speaker
place here, you know, one, where these sacrifices, and two, is it because they're, you know, not necessarily kids, but they're not necessarily adults yet, that they're here. So that kind of idea of liminality is really interesting when you look at animal bones, because, you know, there's a lot of domestic bones in these assemblages, there's a lot of cows, there's a lot of, you know, sheep.
00:45:16
Speaker
at play. So is it because they're not necessarily wild animals and they're kind of considered more in the domestic sphere? You know, it's a lot of stuff going on. And like I was saying earlier, it's a really good example of kind of the limitations in zoology because there's just so much here. There's so many weird animals there. We've got
00:45:36
Speaker
dogs slash wolf bones everywhere. We've got cats. Cats have been eating things like we were saying before, you know, gnawing might be an indicator that it's not ritual, but it probably is ritual. I don't know. There's a lot going on.
00:45:53
Speaker
Can I ask a question about your research? So when you're talking about cave space as being a liminal space, I mean, this is where we often see the first places of like ritual. You know, I think there's the famous Bear Cave. There was, what was the recent cave explored a couple of years ago in Africa, where there was a number of caves
00:46:20
Speaker
Oh yeah. I can remember that at the moment as well. I'm not going to do Google search on the fly because I'll get it wrong. But the point is that it seems that cave spaces have been for thousands of years, ritual spaces. However, is it possible that because cave spaces
00:46:40
Speaker
are seen as a ritual space, that we are ignoring other places of ritual, that we, by making a cave seem to be the ritual space, is it actually a ritual space or is it everywhere a ritual space? It's the division of labour within a house ritual space, you know? How do you feel about that, the definition of ritual space?
00:47:08
Speaker
I mean, it's just hard, like honestly, especially speaking as someone who's doing their PhD research on this, and you know, as a PhD candidate, I want to be able to, you know, say definitively, this is a ritual space. This is the reasons why. But I mean, that's kind of the problem I'm running into. So at least in my caves, you know,
00:47:30
Speaker
Like I said, there's gnawing going on. There's clearly animal activity. So I wanted to say, hey, it's probably not ritual, but then you also get a bunch of animal bones that are being actively burnt, actively cut up, lots of animal bones being cut up. So there's clearly something else going on here. It's every time I think that this is not ritual or every time I think this is definitely ritual, something happens where I...
00:47:56
Speaker
It kind of contradicts that, and I think that's kind of the case of ritual as a thing in general. There's a lot of conflicting aspects to ritual, but I also think that it's just kind of an inherent thing because ritual isn't necessarily a logical thing, you know?
00:48:12
Speaker
So I'm just wondering with all of its kind of like prescriptive processes, its metaphors, its analogies, the way in which we approach life after death or death after death and the rules that we have for putting everything in its place and making logical conclusions and you know,
00:48:36
Speaker
having not having coming back to the start of the episode not having control over things that we might like have control is then archaeology itself a ritual oh yeah definitely it's a ritual and uh kind of pretending that we're not all gonna die so we're just systematically systematically looking through ancient people's rubbish
00:49:00
Speaker
Yeah, biding our time. Which would be really frowned upon at present day. Do you think that's possibly in a bid that hopefully in the future, future archaeologists will kind of look at us and treat our remains with some respect in sort of like a pay-it-forward kind of ritual way?
00:49:18
Speaker
I mean, what really does separate ritual life from anything else? I mean, you know, because you were talking about rituals that seem to have functions as well. You know, rituals don't necessarily have to be associated with burials, but at the same time, you can understand a burial context with ritual elements in it, even though the burial itself could be a ritual.
00:49:41
Speaker
And the stuff in the caves, Alex, are we talking about funerary rites here or are we talking about other rites?
00:49:50
Speaker
Well, that's the thing is that there is also clearly some kind of funerary rites going on because there are so many human remains here. That's kind of the idea and that they were probably excarnated, probably they were disarticulated somewhere else and then brought to this cave. So again, there's the complication that there's clearly something intentional going on here. It's just kind of trying to piece the two together. So that's kind of like the big
00:50:19
Speaker
Next step for me is kind of comparing the two. I'm going to be looking at all the human remains, kind of seeing how they treated them in comparison to how they treated the animal remains. That's a whole big thing.
00:50:31
Speaker
It is difficult, you know, like this whole thing could be this could be a podcast in itself where we literally go on about in this in circles, but it is important to note that there is valid research that can be done in this. It's just because it's just because there's a possibility of ritual falling into a circle doesn't mean you can't get something meaningful out of it.
00:50:55
Speaker
You know, I think it's very, you can be very quick to kind of say, well, it goes in circles and circles and means that we can't prove anything. But actually, I think archaeology is very special in the fact that not only do we know what we don't know, we know our limits, you know, we know to which degree we can be certain or we're kind of have a interest in something.
00:51:21
Speaker
I mean, I think it can be something really fascinating. And I think it's really cool. There's obviously a reason why you're doing your PhD. It's not just because you need to do a PhD. You obviously find it interesting. Oh, no, I love it. Like, the thing is, I love it. And it just comes to problems when you ask me to explain it. Because it's like, it's just very hard. And that's well, that's what I want to take away to be for this episode is ritual is very complicated.
00:51:50
Speaker
No, it definitely is, definitely is. Simona, any closing thoughts there? I think that ritual is a very challenging subject, but I think sort of in the lines of what you have already said, just because something is challenging, it doesn't mean that we should be shying away from it. Yeah, we did a whole podcast on it.
00:52:09
Speaker
I think that is another episode of Argue Animals Done. And as always, you know, find us on Twitter, on Facebook, ask us questions if you want. And yeah, also, of course,
00:52:26
Speaker
check our show notes, which will be up on archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. And it will have all of our sources and photos, everything you need to kind of understand what we're talking about. So it's been great. And this has been Alex and...
00:52:47
Speaker
and Simona. Have a nice day, evening, night, something.
00:53:04
Speaker
Thank you for listening to RQ Animals. Please subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. You can find us on Twitter at RQ animals. Also, the views expressed on the podcast are those of ourselves, the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily represent those of our institution, employers, and the RQ only podcast network. Thanks for listening.
00:53:29
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:53:50
Speaker
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