SUMMARY
With his latest book, Hodder has become indispensable reading for students of religion, openly challenging the idea prevalent in the discipline - an idea which Hodder himself shared for many years - that religion can be studied only from textual material.
With his co-contributors from theology, anthropology and cognitive religious science, a barrier has been broken and archaeological material legitimated by scholarly authorities of the day as a source for the study of religion on the same lines as text.Even so, Hodder consistently protects himself with conditional forms as when suggesting that “human skulls may well have circulated for some time before final interment” (Hodder & Meskell 2010: 53) or people “may have come to see wild animals as provided by ancestors or human mythic figures” (ibid.: 64). This contrasts with the older Hodder whose interpretation did not go further than the material allowed.
We now know that Hodder thinks there was religion in the Neolithic. However, this religion is not assumed to have been invented with the Neolithic, but as people came to Qatal Hoyiik, they already “brought with them a symbolic and religious world through which they envisaged and built the town” (Hodder 2010c: 341). Confronted with the question of just when religion as such is assumed to have begun, he only answers dimly: “Religion can be seen as an emergent quality deriving from aspects of human nature and the human condition” (2010c: 347). Although probably realistic as an assessment of his current thought, it certainly does not answer the question, and also renders Qatal Hoyiik peripheral to the issue of the development of religion.
SUGGESTED READING
Insoll, T. (ed.) 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion. Oxford.
“Keywords in Material Religion”. Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, special issue 7(1), 2011.
Olsen, B. 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Lanham.
Tilley, C. 1999. “Why Things Matter: Some Theses on Material Forms, Mind and Body”. In Glyfer och arkeologiska rum, A. Gustafsson & H. Karlsson (eds), 315-39. Goteborg.
Watkins, T. 2003. “Memes, Memcplcxes and the Emergence of Religion in the Neolithic”. In Magic Practices and Ritual in the Near Eastern Neolithic, H.-G. Gebel, B. Dahl Hermansen & C. Jensen (eds), 41-7. Berlin. Wilson, P. 1988. Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven & London.