PREHISTORIC RELIGION
There is no consensus on the issue of whether or not one can talk about “prehistoric religion”, and the work of those who have actually dealt with the matter has led in very different directions.
Scholars of religion have few methodological tools to work with material culture when no texts are available to “explain” or support interpretations of the material.In recent years, a number of scholars have begun to theorize on the origins of religion via cognitive approaches. These approaches understand “origins” largely as biologically hardwired mental dispositions and their expressions, and presuppose that ancient materials can be understood on the basis of observations made on modern people. One of the basic assumptions of such a method means assuming that the present character of religion as understood today corresponds to the origins. Given the ambiguous character of material culture, it is always possible to debate how it can be interpreted. However, the origins might be very different from the modern form - and thus developing interpretive frameworks based on hypotheses related to the existing forms of religion might be the wrong approach. By contrast, prehistoric religion in the sense studied by archaeologists involves interpreting the material of the past as it is preserved, and these materials have led them to formulate a diverse set of views. We have decided to provide several different such archaeological perspectives. This allows an insight into the work being done today and into the differences in approaches and interpretation.
The current debate about the origins, forms and development of religion in prehistory is also a reflection of the evolution of archaeology. Until the end of the Second World War, archaeology was largely an empirical discipline occasionally exploited for nationalist reasons. Some time after the war, this “traditional” approach gave way to a gradual transformation called the “New Archaeology” which affected archaeological thinking, mostly in the English-speaking countries, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
The major concept of this trend was to try to study the material on its own terms and not as a mere search for national identities or in order to establish chronologies. The methods were more rigorously “scientific” and aimed at answering modest questions related to economic and technological developments, occasionally touching on identity, but usually setting aside complicated issues such as religion. One particular trend of the New Archaeology has since been dubbed “processual archaeology”, particularly by the “post-processual” archaeologists who in recent decades have largely spurred on a debate about religion and cognition - issues which somehow fell by the wayside in the theoretical debates for most of the second half of theLisbeth Bredholt Christensen and David A. Warburton look at the work of Ian Hodder who in his work with Neolithic material has come close to developing a methodology which resembles that of the study of religion. Whereas for many years Hodder refused to speak about religion, his recent works are dedicated to this subject.
Jorg Petrasch raises the question of whether Neolithic figurines of central and south-eastern Europe should be interpreted in a religious (cultic, ancestor-related) context or not, and concludes that they should. Nonetheless, he draws a picture of the Neolithic as a period when religion did not (yet) play any large role and religious specialists, cultic areas and communal rituals were not (yet) common, but in the course of which (and even more with the Bronze Age) the role of these elements increased.
Charlotte Damm compares Neolithic religious practices in farmer-pastoralist southern Scandinavia with hunter-fisher Fennoscandia. In southern Scandinavia grave structures and burial practices are seen as relating to ancestors, while depositions point towards other kinds of powers. In Fennoscandia, material such as rock art and burial practices is seen as linking individuals, animals and deceased group members in a more diffuse and malleable world-view similar to what can be observed also among modern hunters.
Flemming Kaul argues that it is possible for archaeologists to study religion in the Bronze Age and that the evidence shows an elaborate mythology concerned with the journey of the sun, which can be read from images on razors. In his view, Bronze Age peoples saw the sun as a god, although not, or only sometimes, as an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic one. Whereas razors were the medium for illustrating cosmology and myth, rock art was the medium for illustrating rituals.
Kristian Kristiansen first gives a theoretical overview of how the interest in religion among archaeologists partly reflects societal conjunctures. Secondly, he gives his interpretation of Bronze Age religion, placing Scandinavian material in a larger European and Indo-European context. Linking textual and archaeological material he suggests that religion throughout Europe at this time was characterized by a considerable degree of unity. In particular, he adduces the example of “the Divine Twins”, who played a significant role both as a pair of gods and as a reflection of a real, dual leadership.
Finally, Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen and David A. Warburton make some remarks about the whole prehistorical archaeological project.