hen you have people who are removing skulls from their dead and keeping them, re-plastering them, painting them, and handing them down over generations, it’s fairly clear that evidence is about the spiritual.” Professor Ian Hodder invokes this early Holocene Age precursor of family portraiture as proof that archaeologists can identify religious elements in ancient societies.
Hodder, the director of Stanford Archaeology Center, is in charge of the three-year program “Spirituality and Religious Ritual in the Emergence of Civilization.” This project has taken an unusually interdisciplinary approach to the study of the role of spirituality and religious ritual in the transition of humanity from hunter-gatherers to settled agriculturalists and founders of civilized society. The major activities of the program are archaeological excavation and scientific analysis, and multidisciplinary seminars at the internationally recognized site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey.
The project is addressing several key questions. The first, to which Hodder is responding in his remarks about heirloom skulls, is how can archaeologists recognize the spiritual, religious, and transcendent in early time periods? Another question the program asks is whether changes in spiritual life and religious ritual are a necessary prelude to the social and economic changes that lead to “civilization”? That has entailed a detailed investigation of what such spiritual practices might be. “One of the strongest,” says Hodder, “is the role of ancestors and the notion that every aspect of daily life is imbued with the presence of the ancestors and that looking after them is necessary for the survival of the present and future generations.”
As for the spiritual influence on the transformation of hunter-gatherers into farmers, Hodder says: “We’re fairly sure that’s true because we’ve been discussing some of the new discoveries in southeast Turkey which show that there are very large sites which exist before agriculture. It seems to make a very good case that people came together for religious and symbolic reasons initially, and it was that coming together which then led to settlement and the domestication of plants and animals.”
But on another important question the team has come up with a negative conclusion. This concerns whether violence and death acted as the foci of transcendent religious experience in the Holocene period. “The Templeton group has been less sure about that,” says Hodder. “There are all sorts of interpretative problems relating to identifying images that are violent, so I guess that is one hypothesis we would probably reject as a result of our discussions.”
It is these interdisciplinary discussions of data that have given the project its unique character. “We have a group of scholars consisting of philosophers, theologians, and anthropologists who have worked with the archaeologists at the site. Every year they have spent a week at the archaeological site in Turkey, and we’ve had some discussions that have been very fruitful.” There have also been meetings at Stanford and a series of writing projects that will result in a book. “It wasn’t supposed to be part of the original plan. But the group has been so effective in working together that we have decided to do a publication.”
What is the big question? “I think the biggest question is why? Why did humans settle down and have domesticated plants and animals, and start what we now recognize as civilization? Why did they bother to do that, since they had managed for hundreds of thousands of years before that as hunters and gatherers? So why did it all change? Why did we become who we are? I don’t think anyone would say that wasn’t the major question of the period, and I don’t think anyone would say that it’s really been resolved.”