http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/22/healthscience/snrelig.html

The ancient roots of elitism

By Nicholas Wade
The New York Times
Thursday, December 23, 2004

The Michigan archaeologists believe that the ideas of a former
colleague, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, may explain several
of their findings. Rappaport, who died in 1997, felt that
religion, because of its universality, must have played some
salient role in human evolution. A critical threat for all social
animals is the free rider - a member who seizes the advantages of
sociality without contributing to its costs.

When humans evolved language, a process that was probably
completed some 50,000 years ago, they developed a crucial new
element of human sociality, but one that was easily subverted by
free riders who used language to deceive.

Rappaport proposed that religion evolved with language as a means
of certifying certain messages as true, and also of imposing some
kind of order among those who bought into the idea.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/22/healthscience/snrelig.html

The ancient roots of elitism

By Nicholas Wade
The New York Times
Thursday, December 23, 2004

NEW YORK Archaeologists have traced the development of religion in
one location over a 7,000-year period, reporting that as an early
society changed from foraging to settlement to the formation of an
archaic state, religion also evolved to match the changing social
structure.

This archaeological record, because of its length and
completeness, sheds an unusually clear light on the origins of
religion, a universal human behavior but one whose evolutionary
and social roots are still not well understood.

The new findings are the fruit of 15 years of excavations in the
Oaxaca Valley of southern Mexico that have brought to light a
remarkably complete series of structures used for religious
purposes. Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery, two archaeologists at
the University of Michigan, describe their results in the current
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Oaxaca Valley was home to people who around 7000 B.C. were
hunters and gatherers with no fixed abode. By 1500 B.C., the
Oaxacans had developed strains of maize that enabled them to
settle in villages that were occupied throughout the year. The
earliest village societies were probably egalitarian like the
foragers who preceded them. But by 1150 B.C. the first signs of
social hierarchy appear, with an elite who lived in big houses,
wore jade-studded clothes and deformed their skulls, as a sign of
nobility, by binding their children's heads. The Oaxacans
flourished and in 500 B.C. founded a populous and warlike society
at Monte Alban known as the Zapotec state.

The religious practices of each of these four stages of society
can be inferred from the structures that the archaeologists have
excavated and dated. At the hunter-gatherer stage, ceremonies took
place on a plain dance floor, its sides marked by stones. To judge
by the behavior of modern hunter-gatherers, ritual dancing took
place at times of year when many foraging groups came together for
initiations and courtship.

The pre-Zapotec dance floor has been dated to 6650 B.C. But the
foragers' ritual practices were not confined to dancing. A cave of
the same period in a nearby valley has yielded the remains of
individuals who appear to have been beheaded, cooked and eaten.
Their remains were then buried with baskets of harvested wild
plants, indicating that the human sacrifice had ancient roots.

When the Oaxacans settled in permanent villages, their rituals
became more formal. The Michigan archaeologists have excavated
four men's houses, all oriented in the same direction. This
suggests the Oaxacans had formalized the rituals of their
forebears and now held ceremonies at fixed times determined by the
position of the sun or stars.

By the third stage of society, marked by the emergence of elites,
these men's houses had metamorphosed into temples, oriented in the
same direction as the houses but subject to a baroque system of
two interlocking calendars.

By the time of the Zapotec state, the fourth stage of society, the
temples had grown more complex, with special rooms for the new
caste of religious officers, the priests.

The religion of the Oaxacan people became both more elaborate and
more exclusionary as society evolved, the archaeologists conclude.
The hunter-gatherers' ritual dances would have been open to all,
the men's houses were open only to initiated members, and by the
state stage, religion had come under the control of a special
priestly caste.

Why did religion evolve with society in this way? A leading
proposal is that it plays a cohesive role. Rituals were especially
important in hunter-gatherer societies, which were egalitarian and
had no chiefs or hierarchy.

Religion may have continued to serve as the principal source of
cohesion in the first settled societies until they developed
systems of political authority. But when elites and kings emerged,
they did not dispense with the religious systems. Instead they
employed religion as another mechanism of social control and as a
means of maintaining their privileged position. "Ritual becomes
part of the justification for being politically elite," Marcus
said.

The Michigan archaeologists believe that the ideas of a former
colleague, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, may explain several
of their findings. Rappaport, who died in 1997, felt that
religion, because of its universality, must have played some
salient role in human evolution. A critical threat for all social
animals is the free rider - a member who seizes the advantages of
sociality without contributing to its costs.

When humans evolved language, a process that was probably
completed some 50,000 years ago, they developed a crucial new
element of human sociality, but one that was easily subverted by
free riders who used language to deceive.

Rappaport proposed that religion evolved with language as a means
of certifying certain messages as true, and also of imposing some
kind of order among those who bought into the idea.

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