Reconstruction of Ideology
Reconstructing Ideology
Reconstructing ideology involves making inferences about what people thought, including worldviews, beliefs, intellectual frameworks, and values. Inferring ideology from material remains has long been considered the most difficult of all archaeological inferences. Cognitive archaeology emerged in the late twentieth century as a major theme of archaeological research, focusing on evidence of sacred sites and religious ritual, mortuary practices, and art. Cannibalism and trepanation are also often considered in the framework of ideology.
Sacred Sites and Religious Ritual
Sacred sites are presumed to have religious significance and religion is defined as a shared belief about supernatural powers. Religious rituals are formalized, repetitive acts associated with religious beliefs, and often take place at sacred sites.
Colin Renfrew (1994) suggests that religious ritual can be identified by material evidence that:
Focuses attention.
Reflects boundary zones between this world and the next.
Represents images or symbols of a deity.
Demonstrates participation and offering.
Site location, special buildings, features, and artifacts may serve to focus attention. Mountaintops and caves can represent the interface between worlds. Features such as altars, artifacts such as figurines, and repeated symbols also function to focus attention.
The boundary zones between this world and the next may also be reflected in the presence of water, such as in basins or pools. Evidence of deities may come in a variety of forms, including carved figurines, painted images, and frescoes, all of which may be abstract or realistic.
Evidence of participation and offering may be reflected in art and iconography representing prayer or worship. The presence of drugs or musical instruments may represent induced religious experiences. Offerings of various kinds may also be interpreted as evidence ritual, including human and animal sacrifice as well as offerings of food, drink, and artifacts.
Capa Cocha
Capa cocha, an Inka ritual involving the sacrifice of children to the gods on mountaintops. Pilgrimages would culminate with the sacrifice of a child on high altitude sites in the Andes. A wealth of goods was offered, including figurines made of gold, silver, and exotic shell.
At least four archaeological indicators of ritual are evident in the capa cocha sites:
The mountaintop locations, which represent both a place for focusing attention and a boundary zone between this world and the next.
The sacrifice of children.
The presence of figurines.
A great investment in time (trekking to the very high altitudes of the Andes).
Mortuary Practices
The deliberate and ritualistic postmortem treatment and disposition of the body is usually taken to indicate a belief in an afterlife. Disposing of bodies by burial is more time-consuming than other means of disposition. At a minimum, it is taken to represent a reverence for the dead.
The presence of grave goods usually strengthens inferences about a belief in an afterlife. When the grave goods include food, this is almost always taken to affirm a belief in an afterlife. When the grave goods consist of personal artifacts, some archaeologists may counter that this simply represents further reverence for the dead and perhaps a belief in bad luck (from using artifacts associated with a deceased individual).
The positioning of a body may provide some indication of belief systems. Bodies laid out in cardinal directions, such as an east-west alignment correlated with the rising and setting of the sun. The alignment of the bodies may even be used to make inferences about specific religions. For example, individuals were buried on their side and aligned towards Mecca, suggesting the individuals were Muslim. In a study of almost 500 Inuit burials from Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, Barbara Crass (1999) identified distinctive alignments in directional orientations that she suggests can be correlated with Inuit ideology about different realms of the afterlife, with the positioning of the body directing the soul to the proper realm.
It is not uncommon for archaeologists to discover human remains buried in the fetal position. Ochre sprinkled around or painted on bodies, which also suggests belief systems strongly tied to the earth. Usually red and powdery, ochre is roughly translated in many languages as “blood of the earth.”
Whether burials were individual or collective can be used to make inferences about the values of the society. When a collection of individuals buried together are identified as a family, for example, it may be inferred that the sense of family was highly valued. Similarly, it is not uncommon for individuals to have undergone a primary burial followed by a secondary burial, providing evidence of the value placed on descent groups.
The Meaning of Art
Both visual and performing arts are recognizable in the archaeological record, but the visual arts receive most attention.
Pictographs and petroglyphs are often considered to be the work of shamans attempting to influence supernatural powers. Pictographs and petroglyphs are often located in remote and difficult-to-access locations, such as cliff faces and deep recesses of caves. Also, the style of rock art is often distinct from other art associated with the community, suggesting a different purpose. Pictograph images are often superimposed over each other, suggesting that it is the process of doing art, rather than the final product, that is most important.
Non-shamanistic explanations of rock art include those tied to economics and social life. Art is often seen as a mechanism of recording and measuring, which is also often seen as a component of ideology. Similarly, art is often perceived to be a reflection of gender, sexuality, and power, which are both social and ideological.
Most studies of art in the context of reconstructing ideology focus on two-dimensional artistic depictions (such as painting) as well as three-dimensional sculptures manufactured from wood, stone, clay, antler, bone, and metal. The Venus figurines are found in many sites in Europe dating between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. The figurines, averaging about 11 centimeters (4.4 inches) in height and made from a variety of materials, generally portray women, often with large buttocks and breasts, and explicit genitalia. Features of the face are often simple or nonexistent. There is no consensus on what these figures mean, but they are usually correlated with ideology. The figures have been variously interpreted as symbols of fertility, goddesses, or matriarchies; self-portraits by women artists; educational tools; and prehistoric pornography.
Cannibalism and Trepanation
Although not common, evidence of cannibalism does exist in the archaeological record. It isn't likely, however, that cannibalism has ever been a regular component of any group's subsistence strategy.
Hunting, killing, and butchering humans does not make economic sense. Hunting deer, for example, is less dangerous and provides more meat per individual than most humans.
Where cannibalism does occur, it is often interpreted as being opportunistic, such as when killing enemies, which is a form of both exocannibalism and vengeance cannibalism. This may explain why some archaeological sites exhibit some human remains that have been obviously cannibalized, while some other individuals have been buried.
Based on ethnographic observations, some evidence of cannibalism can be inferred to be ritualistic in nature. Ethnographic observations of cannibalism in recent times suggest that cannibalism usually demonstrates a reverence for the dead. When a prominent person of a particular lineage dies, for example, parts of that individual may be cannibalized by other members of the lineage in a show of respect and perhaps in the belief that they may obtain some of that person's qualities and abilities. These are examples of both endocannibalism and ritual cannibalism.
Archaeological indicators of cannibalism include bones that have been cooked, bones that have been broken in a particular fashion to get marrow, butchery marks on the bone, and disposal with other trash. These indicators are most likely to suggest that food was the primary reason for the cannibalism. Another indicator of cannibalism, particularly ritualistic cannibalism, is an artificially enlarged foramen magnum. A common method of extracting the brain was to extract it through the foramen magnum, which was enlarged by removing some of the bone around the edges of the hole.
Trepanation, also known as trephination, is the removal of a piece of bone from the skull. Trepanation is known to have occurred in prehistoric times in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, with more than 1,000 known cases in total. Bone was typically removed by incising or drilling.
Trepanation is often considered in the context of ideology because a common explanation for the phenomena is that the procedure was done on people who have been thought to be possessed by evil spirits, with the removal of bone providing a route for them to escape. It has been thought to be ritualistic and as a medical procedure to relieve perceived pressure on the skull and perhaps some conditions like epilepsy.
Because many trepanned skulls show no signs of healing around the edges of the incised or drilled hole, it is assumed that death was not an unlikely consequence of the procedure, presumably by infection setting into the brain. Evidence of healing around the edges of the hole on many others, however, indicates that the procedure wasn't always fatal. Some individuals evidently went through the procedure up to several different times during their lifetimes.