And how is this going to help a team of crack scientists at The Smithsonian solve a modern day murder while also navigating the difficulties of having an intimate social life as a professional in DC?
Seems like you'd quickly run out of floor and/or end up with a lot of bodies in one place. And are you chipping up your plaster floor every time someone dies? I'm pretty skeptical that this makes sense as a practice. Seems far more likely that a building was built over a forgotten grave.
We know of many, many cultures that have buried remains under house floors as ritual practice. Sometimes our "common sense" isn't a reliable guide to distant cultures.
Estimating "common" is quite difficult, but given that there are pre-colonial aboriginal australian burial sites, we can estimate that it either can be traced to Africa or is sufficiently common to not be surprising. There is even evidence (not proof) of neanderthal burial rituals, fwiw.
I suspect it has to do with our advanced capacity for emotion. The death of a loved one is so difficult to bear, having their body sitting out in the open in a rotting state would be horrific. Burying serves the dual purpose of hiding their decomposition and keeping them close to the community.
Also, disposing of corpses means less diseases around. It's possible that communities that carelessly left the dead around unwittingly opted out of the genetic pool.
"False start" refers specifically to races, or an effort that was not sincere or well thought out. "My jumping the gun" is also a race term, but also means coming to an incorrect conclusion based on insufficient evidence (when it's insufficiency is apparent).
I always thought that 'ceremonial room' looked more like a sauna than a sacrificial pit. It reminded me of the Roman ruins at Bath more than anything else.
The point of naming it a "skull cult" is really just pointing out people found human remains to be important—something largely true today too, and hardly more romantic than our own understanding of burial.
More evidence for David Graeber and David Wengrow's reading of the site.
Between Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Cahokia, and other sites we have pretty good evidence of complex urban societies that did not rely on agriculture. And even in these few sites we have abundant evidence of diversity of social structures from radically egalitarian to hierarchical
The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead
What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.
And how is this going to help a team of crack scientists at The Smithsonian solve a modern day murder while also navigating the difficulties of having an intimate social life as a professional in DC?
Was subfloor burial common in Neolithic?
Seems like you'd quickly run out of floor and/or end up with a lot of bodies in one place. And are you chipping up your plaster floor every time someone dies? I'm pretty skeptical that this makes sense as a practice. Seems far more likely that a building was built over a forgotten grave.
We know of many, many cultures that have buried remains under house floors as ritual practice. Sometimes our "common sense" isn't a reliable guide to distant cultures.
Estimating "common" is quite difficult, but given that there are pre-colonial aboriginal australian burial sites, we can estimate that it either can be traced to Africa or is sufficiently common to not be surprising. There is even evidence (not proof) of neanderthal burial rituals, fwiw.
I suspect it has to do with our advanced capacity for emotion. The death of a loved one is so difficult to bear, having their body sitting out in the open in a rotting state would be horrific. Burying serves the dual purpose of hiding their decomposition and keeping them close to the community.
Also, disposing of corpses means less diseases around. It's possible that communities that carelessly left the dead around unwittingly opted out of the genetic pool.
Unless you're going to eat your loved (or hated) one you need to get rid of the body before it starts rotting, for health reasons.
Burial is the standard way for very good practical reasons. Having somewhere to put a flower is also nice.
I think it's likely associated with desert cultures since vegetation nucleates around burial sites due to access to organic material.
Fun fact: forensic teams locate buried bodies by looking for vegetation that grows above them. There's a lot of fertilizer there.
Some people were quick to jump on the gun and call it a human sacrifice site, I’m glad that they’re all proven wrong now.
The phrase is "jump the gun" or "jumped the gun" as in a fault start in a race started with a gun.
The phrase is “false start.”
"False start" refers specifically to races, or an effort that was not sincere or well thought out. "My jumping the gun" is also a race term, but also means coming to an incorrect conclusion based on insufficient evidence (when it's insufficiency is apparent).
I always thought that 'ceremonial room' looked more like a sauna than a sacrificial pit. It reminded me of the Roman ruins at Bath more than anything else.
That's a much less romantic explanation than the skull cult stuff
We tried penis cult but there were complaints
The point of naming it a "skull cult" is really just pointing out people found human remains to be important—something largely true today too, and hardly more romantic than our own understanding of burial.
More evidence for David Graeber and David Wengrow's reading of the site.
Between Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Cahokia, and other sites we have pretty good evidence of complex urban societies that did not rely on agriculture. And even in these few sites we have abundant evidence of diversity of social structures from radically egalitarian to hierarchical
The linear narrative of the evolution of human societies is dead
Out of curiosity couldn’t this also mean that we are missing the agriculture? Or that the practices they used were very different from today.
At a large enough scale and a short enough time horizon, you're not going to miss it.
I don't think anyone is saying they FOR SURE didn't cultivate a couple flowers and magic mushrooms.
If they were an agricultural society resembling anything like the ones we see later, there are several things you'd expect to find.
> More evidence for David Graeber
What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.