EARLY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

In contrast to the processual archaeologists, d’Errico asserts that the issue of religion is a legitimate line of scientific enquiry - but that one must define each step, beginning with the term “religion” and the meaning of the evidence.

For his understanding of religion, he basically relies on Clifford Geertz, but his own succinct definition involves it being “a set of socially shared and transmitted beliefs encoding a group’s understanding of the essence of reality”. While “religion is about the deep symbolic content of life” (d’Errico 2009: 106), he views language as elementary for “the emergence of religion” (ibid.: 107). However, he stresses that the evidence of material culture is such that it could aid in the propagation and spread of religion in the ordinary sense of the term.

In a general survey of the issues, d’Errico stresses that archaeologists are not really prepared to be consulted about the original nature and origins of religion - but that they are the only ones who have “the best information” on the matter (ibid.: 104). Thus, he stresses a need for the study of religion to come closer to archaeology and vice versa. He notes that this is in fact beginning to happen, and that one of the results of this reaching out is a tendency to link biological evolution with cognitive abilities.

He notes, however, that - paradoxically for the archaeologist who pursues this route - the inevitable result means disregarding the archaeological evidence as being irrelevant. This is because the cognitive development would be the result of the evolution, and thus evidence of brain size would suffice to reduce archaeological evidence to at most marginal relevance. In my opinion, d’Errico is correct to follow this route, rather than the opposite track followed by Steve Mithen. Mithen is an archaeologist who effectively tries to reduce the importance of the scattered actual archaeological evidence and tries to select evidence that supports his biological/cognitive evolutionary approach (cf.

Warburton [2004] 2008).¹

D’Errico’s approach is to argue that the archaeological material should be examined, and he suggests that this material can provide an answer to the question of whether religion is species-specific or trans-specific. After going over the material and dismissing controversial examples, d’Errico concludes that “Abstract or depictional representations and personal ornaments are the only unquestioned evidence for the emergence of symbolism” (d’Errico 2009: 108). The most important of these is the indisputable case of the Berekhat Ram figurine discussed above. According to d’Errico, if cognitive faculties were speciesspecific, one would expect the gradual appearance of increasing concentrations of evidence in the last 200,000 years in Africa. Instead of this, however, what we see is the gradual appearance of symbolic materials during the last 300,000 years, and also that even in the last 100,000 years the earliest humans shared some attributes with the Neanderthals.

Thus d’Errico concludes that symbolic expression antedates the appearance of our earliest ancestors and is trans-specific. From the archaeological evidence, he also concludes that it cannot be traced back to a single time and place whence it spread (as would be expected if it were related to our own species). Furthermore, he suggests that it may not be permissible to suppose a significant cognitive difference between Neanderthals and our ancestors (with which I would tend to disagree).

For d’Errico, this means that religious beliefs developed in diverse forms over a long period; going through various stages, they eventually became self-sustaining in the production of meaning when subjected to efforts at elaboration. For him, it also means that prior to the efforts at elaboration, symbolic thought may have existed without evidence in material culture. Almost paradoxically, however, this in turn allows d’Errico to propose that the evolutionary stages of the development of social thought may in fact be recognizable in material culture.

On the one hand, this means recognizing different stages of development, but on the other it allows one to follow near universals such as shamanism, precisely because shamanism is so closely identified with specific paraphernalia - which will be found in excavations if it existed. This permits d’Errico to place shamanism at a relatively recent phase - in contrast to others, such as David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes.

Thus d’Errico concludes that the use of symbolism in archaeological material can be read in a fashion which erases the significance of the biological distinction between our ancestors and other groups. It follows that cognitive evolution did not depend exclusively on biological capacity, and thus also that important differences emerged in the stages of religious understanding practised by our own ancestors, and that these can be recognized in the Palaeolithic material long before the earliest paintings. However, the elaboration will have introduced a transformation which led to the self-sustaining production of meaning we see in religion today.

NOTE

1. For an excellent image of what this approach offers, see J. Cook’s (2013) catalogue for the exhibition at the British Museum.

EARLY RELIGIOUS PRACTICES

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