Realising ideological and religious change: investigating the material culture of religion in the earliest villages of the early Neolithic SW Asia

Conference: The Connected Past: Religious Networks in Antiquity

Dates: 7-8 June 2022

Abstract:

The transition from mobile hunting and gathering to more settled and ultimately agricultural lifeways was a momentous one for human history. It necessitated huge changes not only in economic practices and human-environment relationships, but also in human relationships with material culture and with each other, both within and between what were becoming increasingly discrete and long-lived communities. In addition, the data from the very earliest settled village communities of the Near East from the late Epipalaeolithic through to the early Neolithic also demonstrate considerable changes in ideology at this time, and such changes are often considered to be an integral and essential part of the social changes necessitated by such a change in lifeways. Network analysis has proved a particularly effective method for documenting the broader pattern of socio-material changes that occurred over this period, but has not yet addressed patterns at a finer scale, particularly in terms of the variability in patterning that might be seen between different forms of material culture, and/or between different forms of interaction and cultural transmission between communities.

This paper therefore aims to look more closely at the role played by ideological and/or religious material culture and practice in these social transformations. Does ideologically-related material culture change over the course of this transition, either in quantity or in quality? Can we see any subtle changes in the contribution of such items, relative to other forms of material culture and to the overall pattern of social network change, i.e. how do the socio-material networks of ideological and religious paraphernalia compare to those reconstructed from other forms of material culture, such as architecture, personal ornamentation or ground stone? What might such changes tell us about the ways in which social relations, ideologies, and the use of material culture changed over the course of this pivotal transition, and hence the role that ideology and material culture played in the very different social dynamic of settled agricultural societies? From a more methodological standpoint, the paper will also touch on the difficulties of identifying ideologically/religiously-related material culture and differentiating it (or not) from other forms of material culture. It will also consider the potential problems posed by differential types of cultural transmission (direct transmission of objects themselves vs indirect transmission of ideas, innovations and concepts) for archaeological network analysis.

Source: Manual