[HN Gopher] A mysterious cult that predates Stonehenge
___________________________________________________________________
A mysterious cult that predates Stonehenge
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-07-09 08:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| doodlebugging wrote:
| It's pretty easy for some people with the benefit of 8000 years
| of learning to look at something like this and call it a cult.
| That must be the default description archaeologists use to
| describe a society that left no clear records written in the
| archaeologist's native tongue or one that can easily help them
| understand the culture that lived during that time or that built
| those structures.
|
| I originally read this article when it was posted to BBC news
| last week. I was not able to come to the same conclusion about
| this being some kind of cult. Cult to me has negative
| connotations. I would describe these people more charitably and
| probably more accurately as inhabitants who used local materials
| to construct buildings and structures intended to help them
| manage their local resources - food supplies, animals both wild
| and domesticated, protection from heat and cold, etc.
|
| The mustatils themselves look like efficient pens for animals
| raised for consumption and the fact that there are so many
| scattered in such a large area, where we also see evidence of
| many people living together tells me that these mustatils were
| probably meat markets.
|
| The existence of skulls of the goats, cattle, and gazelles just
| tells me what they had managed to capture, control, or
| domesticate. People have to eat.
|
| Another thing really chaps my ass here as the author uses
| ridiculously irrelevant hyperbole to describe one of the mustatil
| in terms of the Eiffel Tower that make no sense to a deep
| thinker.
|
| >Some of the mustatils weigh as much as 12,000 tonnes; more than
| the Eiffel Tower.
|
| What? A mustatil is a collection of rocks. When you put enough
| rocks together you can end up with something that weighs a lot.
| Their dumbass statement makes it sound like building a structure
| out of individual rocks that collectively ended up weighing more
| than a large modern steel structure was a major accomplishment. I
| disagree. I think it was an ordinary response to the need to keep
| a good food supply close to their settlements.
|
| I picture the people who lived here as industrious people who had
| all the skills needed to survive in the climate at the time and a
| good understanding not only of local materials, but of how to use
| those materials to their advantage. Later peoples in the area
| carved massive buildings into solid sandstone. Their predecessors
| were not ignorant cave men stumbling about. Instead, they were
| bright enough to be able to lay out plans for large structures
| and then to build them by doing exactly what we would do today.
| They would use their muscles and reach down and pick up rocks of
| many sizes and over a period of time they would be able to stack
| enough together to accomplish their goal.
|
| I don't know whether they used animals to help drag the larger
| stones or rolled them along the ground on sleds or even how they
| did it. The fact is that they built it one rock at a time and in
| the end they had a well-organized collection of rocks that
| weighed about as much (if you believe an archeologist's estimate)
| as the Eiffel Tower which was itself constructed one piece of
| steel at a time and held together with bolts or rivets. Again,
| that is the way you build something that starts off small and
| ends up huge.
|
| I hope they keep digging out there and that they catalog things
| and geo-reference everything as they go and that one day they can
| tell me what the last guy to live there had for supper based on
| the composition of the most recent coprolite found in the most
| recently dated septic pit.
|
| I just don't think they need to start right off describing
| something as a cult and making it sound mysterious that people
| would slaughter their food animals near where the animals were
| penned and eat the carcass somewhere else. How many of you bring
| a goat head home from the grocery store?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's worth remembering that words aren't static over time and
| the negative connotations you attach to the word 'cult'
| wouldn't have existed for the early romans and greeks we get
| the word from. Early archaeologists and historians, being
| gigantic geeks for classical civilizations, basically copied
| the meaning during the renaissance / early modern period and
| that's where the modern term-of-art comes from. If it helps,
| you can understand it as "specific practices of worship by a
| group, especially if they're non-christian and non-western".
| There's some historical pejorative implications from colonial
| mindsets, but that's a different discussion.
| aaplok wrote:
| > The mustatils themselves look like efficient pens
|
| From the article: "initial theories suggested they were used as
| territorial markers for ancestral grazing grounds. Yet, as more
| and more were found, all dating to the same period, a different
| understanding emerged."
|
| So the cult idea wasn't the archeologists' default description
| and their initial ideas were the same as yours. There aren't
| many hints in the article on why they revised that idea, but
| the following paragraph says this: "They've uncovered large
| numbers of cattle, goat and wild gazelle skulls and horns in
| small chambers in the heads of the mustatil, but found no
| indication that these were kept for domestic use. Since no
| other animal's body parts were found, it led the team to deduce
| that these were sacrificial. It further suggested that the
| animals were sacrificed elsewhere. This is important because it
| is evidence of a highly organised, cultic society, much earlier
| than was previously thought - predating Islam in the region by
| 6,000 years." Any theory will need to explain away the piling
| of animal skulls, and absence of the rest of the animal bodies,
| in the mutatils.
|
| "Cult" should not be read negatively. It's probably a way to
| describe a proto-religion. Not as organised and consistent as
| modern religions, but enough similarities to indicate common
| worshipping practice. Certainly the most interesting part is
| the common culture across a large geographical area, which is
| quite sophisticated for the times.
| the_af wrote:
| > _" cult to me has negative connotations"_
|
| What about the Roman Catholic cult?
| tombh wrote:
| Cult? What unfortunate word choice. We're talking about a period
| possibly 8000 years ago! The common understanding of "cult" is
| shaped by the Euro-centric, post-Christian New Religious
| Movements (the preferred academic nomenclature) of the 1960s. Not
| only did European culture not exist in the Neolithic, nor did
| Christian nor even the so-called Axial Age whence the roots of
| many of the world's major religions.
| nwatson wrote:
| This is the technical use of the word "cult": "a system of
| religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular
| figure or object". As is "the cult of Diana" and not "the
| Branch Davidian or The Children of God cults."
| tombh wrote:
| In what field is it technical? I have a degree in Religious
| Studies and we were taught it was strictly jargon.
| LegitShady wrote:
| > I have a degree in Religious Studies and we were taught
| it was strictly jargon.
|
| sounds like you were in a cult
| pvg wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_(religious_practice)
|
| just like 'cultic practice' is used in the article which is
| not related to the 'New Religious Movement' meaning.
| tombh wrote:
| > This article discusses the _original_ meaning of the
| word "cult", not the term in the sociology of religion,
| new religious movements called "cults", cults of
| personality, or popular cult followings.
|
| Emphasis mine. As far as I was educated this is neither
| the commonly understood nor academically encouraged
| usage.
| pvg wrote:
| It's still used like that in historical or
| anthropological writing. Cult of the emperor, cult of
| this or that. You're just used to a different meaning
| that is also avoided in your particular field where the
| two meanings are more negatively collidey.
| [deleted]
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > In what field is it technical? I have a degree in
| Religious Studies and we were taught it was strictly
| jargon.
|
| Those two terms are synonymous.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jargon#Noun
| [deleted]
| jccooper wrote:
| The common understanding of cult (which I would argue is
| probably "religion I don't like", but that doesn't matter) is
| not in use here. This is a technical usage in archaeology to
| refer to religious interaction with place and object... which
| is basically all prehistoric archaeology can see.
| tombh wrote:
| I wasn't aware of that. It was so drummed into me at
| university (Religious Studies) to avoid the word that I'm
| intrigued as to why another academic field would uses it
| seriously. Do you have any reading recommendations that might
| give an insight into its technical usage?
| kortilla wrote:
| >It was so drummed into me at university (Religious
| Studies) to avoid the word that I'm intrigued as to why
| another academic field would uses it seriously.
|
| Because there would be very little feedback from Religious
| Studies into other fields on what words are acceptable.
| There are disagreements on terminology within academia in
| the same sub-field (I saw this in even programming language
| research).
| insickness wrote:
| Agreed. Was about to comment on the same. Seems like they
| wanted to imply that the religious practices were less evolved
| and complex than modern-day religions. But the word choice
| could be better.
| timeon wrote:
| I'm not good in English or Latin language, but as far as I
| know 'cult' is from Latin 'cultus' which among other things
| may have something to do with worshiping. Maybe in English it
| has negative connotations but for example in my native
| language it does not matter if you say 'cult of sun' or 'cult
| of Jesus'.
| j3th9n wrote:
| These are UFO landing strips.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| For evidence of this I think the archaeologists should focus on
| finding the holes in the corners of the mustatils where they
| planted their tiki torches used to guide those UFO pilots home.
|
| Maybe all the goat, cattle, and gazelle heads is just evidence
| that aliens are only interested in the rear portions of earth's
| animals. That would bolster my personal theory that earth is
| nothing more than a training ground for alien proctologists and
| gastroenterologists. Their first visit convinced them that
| there was nothing here but a bunch of assholes so they decided
| that in spite of that there was still something they could
| learn here.
| crikeyjoe wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-10 23:00 UTC)