11 The religions of prehistoric Europe and the study of prehistoric religion

Lisbeth Bredholt Christensen and David A. Warburton

In this chapter we take the liberty of looking critically at the contributions of the first section of this book. We do so on the assumption that crossing disciplinary borders is difficult: archaeologists have difficulties in discussing religion since religion is assumed to take place in the mind (in the form of ideas and thoughts, and thus in a form which is completely inaccessible in prehistory).

Furthermore, there are other issues which do not normally appear to be problematic in the study of religion. When studying known religions, there is no danger of confusing science and religion, and little of confounding myth and history. Given the neglect of material culture, the importance of art is likewise minimal. In these chapters we have seen how mankind gradually developed a capacity for artistic expression and later exploited iconography to depict the course of the sun. In these pages, religion was associated with social changes and group identities, without any gods. Yet according to the study of reli-gion, religion and its elements are clearly a world apart - so far in fact, that Pascal Boyer (2001) can propose that religious thought is by nature counterintuitive. In fact, these issues - of religion, art, history, society and science - are tangled when trying to understand development of the state in the Near Eastern Bronze Age, and become far more so when trying to isolate religion in prehistory.

The preceding chapters presented a series of different archaeological viewpoints on religion. The presentations reflect two different realities. First, it is a fact that (a) somewhere in the course of the last few million years religion came into existence, and only archaeologists using material culture can tackle this problem since the gods and burial rituals are clearly already present before writing appears and thus antedate the dawn of history; thus the roots of “religion” clearly existed before history began.

The second difficulty is related to the first, and is twofold since (b) archaeologists are not scholars of religion, but (c) they are the only ones with access to the material. Therefore, their voices are essential. There is thus the problem itself that it is (d) far from certain that there were any prehistoric religions, and (e) it is not clear how to approach them (as archaeologists or students of religion), if there were any. Equally serious are the challenges that (f) even many of those archaeologists who contend that there might have been prehistoric religions are persuaded that they cannot be scientifically studied, and in any case (g) any interpretation advanced is not only subject to debate as new evidence is produced, but also open to dispute by colleagues with different views. Given the facts that (h) reading the material is very complicated, (i) that this particular material can never “speak for itself’ and finally (j) that in archaeology it is generally assumed that theories come from outside the discipline, it is questionable just how much can be done.

For these reasons, our aim was to present different views, being as up-to-date and scholarly as possible - while also eclipsing our own views. In this chapter, we do not aim to present our version,¹ but rather to give our general impression of the methodological aspects of the project. The usual definitions of religion stress transempirical entities, ritual and myth. Our own work convinces us that physical paraphernalia and architecture should also be included comprehensively for all religions and all periods covered by the study of religion. These material aspects not only correspond to the reality of religion as a universal phenomenon, but are also the only means of approaching religion in prehistory - as the language-based sources are by definition absent.

In Nordbladh’s presentation, we have an ideal introduction to the reality of archaeological work: drawing on material on the one hand and on theoretical approaches from other disciplines on the other hand. Nordbladh worked with rock art: a category so frequently interpreted in religious terms that a discussion of religion is unavoidable. This is also clear in Kristiansen’s discussion of theoretical perspectives. He likewise takes the study of rock art as his point of departure because this is the field - consisting of images - that has been perceived as “obviously” being religion: a prehistoric parallel to church frescoes, a preliminary form of writing, a representation of belief. Early on, Nordbladh questioned interpretations which simply assume religion. Instead, he investigated the possibilities of applying semiotics to archaeology. Just as Nordbladh ultimately abandoned these efforts, Hodder later likewise abandoned his efforts at using literary theory: both discovered that prehistoric archaeologists cannot work with theories developed in disciplines relying on texts. It follows that Nordbladh argues that interpretations may be better if not constrained by the concept of “religion”. Nordbladh - like Damm, Petrasch and Hodder - does not want to project modern conceptions on to a past where realities were probably quite different. He was at a loss to know how to proceed, finding existing theory inadequate.

D’Errico does not begin with theory, but rather with the material, and draws conclusions from the material. His goal is not to apply anthropological theories or approaches based on the study of religion, but instead he aims at letting the material tell its own tale. Thus, the interpretation or model is based on his interpretations of the significance of his precise observations of the archaeological material.

Anati agrees with d’Errico in tracing religion or symbolling back to the Middle Palaeolithic, but goes further in his interpretations, suggesting not only a vague symbolling but cult and belief in the Middle Palaeolithic, and cult, belief, myth, initiation and shamanism in the Upper Palaeolithic. His central thought is that there was one single - prehistoric - religion which lay at the origin of all later religions. These conclusions are reached on the basis of a comparison between the archaeological material and ethnographic reports on modern hunter­gatherers, on the assumption that the latter represent an image of religion as it also looked in the Palaeolithic, having preserved an “archetypal” relation to the world that most peoples in the Western world have lost or suppressed. Thus, Anati interprets his material from the perspective that there is a kernel in the human, still expressed in some art and some kinds of religion. This contrasts with d’Errico, who interprets his material in the sense that “the symbolling human” has only slowly come into being, through continuous development.

Anati’s approach builds on specific interpretations of ethnographic material, assuming the value of ethnographical parallels to prehistoric hunter-gatherers. In fact, Anati’s conclusions are similar to those of Mithen (1996) who uses a cognitive approach: both argue for the emergence of religion being closely associated with the emergence of anatomically modern humans. In this sense, their objective is quite close to one of the fundamental assumptions of the academic study of religion: that humans alone are religious (an assumption which d’Errico’s work throws into question).

Both in terms of methodology and conclusions, D’Errico’s interpretations seem to fit well with those of Hodder, the two together suggesting that changes came through the production of things. This means that religion must be understood as part of a historical process, resulting directly from the human confrontation with human material culture. For the earliest period, there is very little material, and there is not much evidence of change - and thus d’Errico cannot advance much beyond the optimistically positivist conclusions discussed here. While the field appears ripe for speculation leading in different directions, d’Errico demonstrates that one can work in a methodological fashion to achieve results which are probably at once indisputable and probably the limit of what can be suggested from the Palaeolithic. The implications of this work are extremely important, as they suggest that painstaking detailed studies can lead to conclusions which dismiss the arguments based upon extrapolating from informed speculation (as practised by, e.g., Lewis-Williams 2002) or mere cognitive capacities (as practised by, e.g., Mithen) and open the way to legitimate speculation about religion in the Palaeolithic.

Dealing with the more recent Neolithic, Damm, Petrasch and Hodder have more material and remain very close to it: cautious about material outside their own area of expertise, and avoiding hasty conclusions incorporating concepts from a religious framework dominated by texts and where funerary practices play a very small role. Yet even so, theory plays a role in their thoughts.

Damm works with the Fennoscandian region where figurines are absent; Petrasch deals with central Europe where figurines dominate. Damm interprets the absence of figurines as the absence of personified gods. Petrasch understands the figurines as being made to resemble concrete human individuals. Petrasch assumes that cult (implying a place and a figure of veneration) is a universal human phenomenon.

Whereas the work of most of the scholars represented here is more at home in archaeological discourse, Hodder’s work should appeal immediately to students of religion because it draws so strongly on the material, and concludes in a terminology accompanied by a methodology familiar to students of religion. Of fundamental importance is that, regardless of what it was, early “religion” was an anchor of the home, structuring space, things and people. In this sense, Hodder’s analysis may hint at useful new ways of approaching religion.

However, from the archaeological standpoint, Hodder’s approach is quite weak since even before recent discoveries in Anatolia suggested that monumental religions antedated the Neolithic, Cauvin (1997, 2000) had argued that the Neolithic was the result of cognitive changes which preceded the Neolithic. Thus, on the historical level one must distinguish between the intellectual value of Hodder’s ideas, on the one hand, and the difficulties of understanding the developments on the other. Hodder misses the issue by assuming that the Neolithic simply happened, since it was clearly dependent upon a change which took place in the Near East, and was spread from there by migration. This means that Hodder is not even attempting to account for fundamental changes.

Furthermore, it must be noted that celebrating Hodder’s recent book as a pioneer effort in the cooperation between archaeologists and scholars of religion - as the publishers do - is an exaggeration, overlooking earlier initiatives including, for example, Steinsland (1986), Larsson and Wyszomirska (1989) and Bredholt Christensen and Sveen (1998) which antedate his effort by a decade (quite aside from P. Wilson 1988, which he likewise continues to neglect). However, Hodder’s goal is not providing a survey of the literature so much as offering his own latest interpretations.

And finally, in dismissing the role of Qatal Hdyiik in the development of religion, Hodder has achieved something more than an own goal. Together with the failure to incorporate the scholarly works of others and the reluctance to understand the overall development of the Epipalaeolithic and the Neolithic, Hodder’s contribution is ultimately doomed to be marginal. The issue will be in distinguishing whether religion emerged from the Palaeolithic or from the Bronze Age onwards, effectively eclipsing Hodder’s argument. In this sense, using a methodology familiar to scholars of religion, he misses the question archaeologists face.

Kaul’s contribution on the Bronze Age is a daring attempt to propose the actual reconstruction of what can be viewed as a religion involving the three essential elements of religion: mythology, ritual and sacred architecture. Kaul has no doubt that there was religion with myth and transempirical powers in the Nordic Bronze Age society, and that the material allows us to work with this religion. Significantly, Kaul alone has represented the whole solar cycle, which is never represented in toto in Bronze Age contexts. Individual incidents were illustrated, but not as a complete mythic cycle.

Kristiansen and Larsson (2005: 353) have suggested that Kaul’s approach dismisses the Bronze Age Nordic religion as “obsolete” and “primitive” (cf. also Melheim 2006: 115). Yet, there is no reason to infer that this cyclic or “cosmotheistic” world-view should be classified as primitive. The basic structure of the central myth of the voyage of the sun has some striking similarities with the basics of the religion of ancient Egypt - a religion that we do not regard as particularly primitive. However, the Egyptian material (upon which Kaul draws extensively in other contexts) can be seen in another light: following Assmann’s interpretation, the Egyptian solar cosmology was a process, not a myth.

Although he identifies myth as being religious, Kaul distinguishes religion and ritual. In this sense, he seems to suggest that the ritual actions need not be interpreted in a religious framework.

Kristiansen’s theoretical contribution to this book is anchored in his interpretation of the Bronze Age. Kristiansen works with Ohlmarks, using an interpretation of Scandinavian rock art in a perspective which is thoroughly at home in the history of religion, and does not include central Europe alone, but also the civilizations of the Near East and Mediterranean with their written sources.

Kristiansen’s theoretical observations lead to his part on the religion of Bronze Age in the sense that he introduces people who were “ahead” of their time: those interpreting the content of the rock art were suppressed by the positivism of the New Archaeology. Yet like this earlier tradition, Kristiansen interprets south Scandinavian rock art with the aid of written evidence from the cultures of Egypt and the Near East. Thus, Kristiansen in fact revives interpretations that for many years have been considered old-fashioned because they build on material coming from outside of the Scandinavian area itself. This is contrary to the New Archaeology, whose device was always to interpret a complex within the framework of the context itself. Kristiansen’s interpretations may therefore to some seem a regression. He himself seems to attempt to anticipate the critique by referring to Ohlmarks.

Whereas Kaul and Nordbladh do not speak of gods in the south Scandinavian Bronze Age, Kristiansen does. It is important to note that with or without gods, the glimpses of the cosmology and mythology of the Nordic Bronze Age provide an image of a codified, complex and “advanced” religion. In many religions, including the Egyptian, divine powers or gods can take differing forms: human, animal or hybrid. In fact, what characterizes a god is precisely this mystical ability to change appearances. Thus there are curious parallels.

Yet there is a completely different genre of monument which should also be taken into consideration. Stonehenge demonstrates that Bronze Age Europeans had an understanding of the solar and lunar cycles, based on an annual cycle. Evidently the ancient Scandinavians shared an understanding of the solar cycle. In Scandinavia this was, however, expressed differently, and partially using iconography depicting metaphorical images of incidents in the solar cycle. Yet the Scandinavian version appears to be based on a daily system whereas Stonehenge is based on an annual system. Thus the annual cycle of Stonehenge differs strikingly from the daily cycle of Egypt (which seems to be what Kaul sees in Scandinavia) - and the Egyptians were ultimately obliged to abandon their scientific observations due to their inability to master the annual cycle. Curiously, the second and third millennium evidence from Egypt suggests a scientific observational approach which was abandoned in the first millennium, as all the elements were associated with what we term religion. Is this the history of science or that of religion? The earliest Egyptian astronomical observations and the evidence of Stonehenge would imply that it is science (and even more so when compared to such inadequate explanations as those found in the Old and New Testaments), combined with religion. If we assume that religion as we know it is evolving, we could argue that the scientific elements of cosmology had not yet been expressed in coherent mythic form in the Nordic Bronze Age. This might actually provide a hint about the point of divergence in the two traditions.

This brings us back to another real problem, namely that we have no guidelines for how to read the prehistoric material sources. One of Petrasch’s points is that in his view, religion did not play as large a role in the Neolithic as it came to do later. One way of interpreting this is that what the archaeological material shows us is probably not religion and religious expressions as we have known them for the past 2000 years, but rather the inception and beginnings of a phenomenon ultimately leading to those phenomena that scholars of religion and anthropologists have identified in their material from later times as being such, for example rites de passage, initiation, shamanism, and so on. Another possible interpretation is that - if Petrasch is correct about the ancestor cults - it is possible that one can also note another divergence, namely that of history

(understood as ancestors) and cult (as related to religion and ritual). The result could be that one might begin to be able to identify the emergence of several different cognitive phenomena, phenomena which eventually split off from religion - or from which religion emerged. Yet, the only means of approaching these questions is to follow the rigorous methods of d’Errico.

Hodder’s recent U-turn suggests that d’Errico is following a more coherent path in pursuing the origins of religion. However, d’Errico’s methodology would not really satisfy those familiar with material from the Near Eastern Bronze Age and classical antiquity. This leads to the question of whether Hodder has actually found a new way of studying religion, independent of text, an issue which d’Errico does not really view as part of his project. Were one to respond positively (with reservations), this is not because of Hodder (2010a). Here, Hodder now states that “In house-based societies, houses are religion” (2010c: 345), yet it was precisely this thought that was already present in The Domestication of Europe (1990) where Hodder originally showed how religion can be found in the material, without using the word religion.

All of the contributions here could point in the direction that there are important areas of religion that have been ignored by the study of religion because the forms of expression are non-verbal. In general these could be dismissed as being issues related to archaeology and prehistory, issues demanding that archaeology develop new methodologies. However, we argue that, in general, it is not merely a simple matter of stressing that archaeological material poses questions differing from those posed by and to textual material. We suggest that, in general, archaeological issues actually force a confrontation in the study of religion, one that faces issues which are easily avoided in studies based on verbal sources. It is a question of defining and recognizing religion. Thus, one can argue that these chapters pose some questions about methodology and theory.

However, these questions pale into insignificance when facing the fundamental issue of specifying exactly where religion appears. Was religion already present in the Palaeolithic? Did some fundamental change take place in the Neolithic? Or was the Neolithic only the basis for what happened later in the Bronze and Iron Ages? The question can thus be shifted from archaeological methodology to the centre of the study of religion.

NOTE

1. For our own take on these issues see e.g. Bredholt Christensen & Warburton (2002); Warburton ([2004] 2008, 2010); Bredholt Christensen (2010).