Archaeology, Anthropology and Cult
The Sanctuary at Gilat, Israel
edited by Thomas E. Levy
Equinox Publishing Ltd
equinox
London Oakville
1Archaeology, Anthropology and Cult: Exploring Religion in Formative Middle Range Societies
Thomas E. Levy
Introduction
Ceremonies are the bond that holds the multitudes together, and if the bond be removed, the multitudes fall into confusion. Confucius (551-479 BC)
The discovery of one of the earliest pan-regional ritual centers in the fields of Gilat in Israel's northern Negev desert provides a rare opportunity to explore the role of religion as a critical social evolutionary force that directed, maintained and radically changed various cultural institutions at a time when Middle Eastern societies were crossing the threshold from egalitarian to hierarchical social organizations (Fig. 1.1). The role of religion in social evolution was one of the primary concerns of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, anthropologists and discoveries such as those at Gilat awaken the need to reexamine the power of religion for promoting social evolution. Today, anthropological archaeology is probably the singular academic discipline that consistently investigates social evolution as a principal social phenomenon. While there is no need to justify such an investigation, it is worth quoting Bruce Trigger's (Trigger 1998) remarks which highlight what cultural evolutionary studies can provide for the world community today:
An evolutionary approach should consider the consequences of alternative courses of action in the hope that human beings may choose the course that best assures their collective survival and well-being. In that way, growing complexity may result in true progress, which involves producing the greatest possible good for the greatest number, without inflicting injustice on anyone. The belief that this is possible must not be lost sight of amidst the seductive temptations of a relativism that, despite its valid points, can all too easily descend into amorality and defeatism and end up being used to justify greed and social irresponsibility. Progress is not inherent in sociocultural evolution, but something that individuals must plan and be prepared to fight for if it is to become a reality.
Given the relevance of social evolutionary studies for today's world, we cannot forget the contributions of some of the early cultural evolutionists such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Sir James Frazer, and W. Robertson Smith— especially with regard to the study of religion and social evolution. In the Gilat study presented here, in terms of melding hard archaeological data with anthropological and sociological theory, the
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functionalist works of Emile Dürkheim (Dürkheim 1933, 1995 [orig. 19]2]) and other social evolutionary theorists provide the most useful way of conceptualizing the relationship between religion and society. Dürkheim viewed religion as powerfully strengthening a society's social structure as well as serving as a force for controlling change based on the sacred authority of the social group's values and rules. In this way, religion emerges out of social solidarity but also works to strengthen it. Many of the more recent archaeological studies of religion and social evolution (Bauer and Stanish 2001; Conrad and Demarest 1984; Renfrew 1985a) have relied on different aspects of Durkheim's model of religion. The contributors to this book draw directly or indirectly on some of these Durkheimian concepts as well as some of the early social evolutionary works on religion and society. The early social evolutionists were especially interested in the rise of monotheism and the history of ancient Near Eastern religions. Their control of Northwest Semitic and other languages as well as early ethnographic accounts of the 'manners and customs' of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle Eastern societies make many of these works extremely valuable for our investigation of the rise of pan-regional religious institutions in this part of the world. Many of the most recent anthropological theories of religion (e.g. Boyer 1994; Boyer 200 I; Geertz 1973; Mithen 1996) are too far removed from the material world to be testable in the archaeological record. Thus, from a materialist and a contextual perspective, the Gilat project is rooted in a functionalist perspective which views all elements of a culture as functional; that is, these cultural sub-systems work together to satisfy culturally defined needs of the people in that society or the society as a whole (Binford 1968; Clarke 1968).
Figure 1.1. Northern Negev study area.
Religion and ideology are powerful forces that can direct, influence, maintain and radically change human societies. As Karl Marx observed long ago, 'Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people'
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(Marx 1844 [1970]). Marx was a man who rejected religious belief, but fully understood the power of religion for fundamentally structuring society. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, in a western world that is dominated by technological and material wonders, the power of religion and belief as motivational and organizational forces in human society is seen every day with the confrontations between secular and religious groups, democracy and religious fundamentalism, and the universal problem of traditional culture and society coping with modernity. Religious belief, doctrine and practice lay at the core of human culture. Does this mean that a study of religion will provide all the answers for understanding social change through time? Not necessarily. However, because Gilat is so rich in prehistoric ritual paraphernalia, the focus is on religion to help explain cultural evolution during the formative late fifth-fourth millennium BCE in the southern Levant. If religion and ritual were a key factor in the emergence of Gilat as a hierarchical social center, was this true for most other parts of the southern Levant? To answer this question, it is best to recall K.V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus's (Flannery 1983; Flannery and Marcus 1983) discussion of divergent evolution and the emergence of two complex societies (the Zapotec and Mixtec) in southern Mexico. There it was shown that two neighboring complex societies evolved along similar trajectories for a period of time from a common ancestral tradition, but took divergent evolutionary pathways to become diverse cultures. Similar divergent evolutionary processes may have occurred in the northern Negev, where some 16 km to the south of Gilat, one of the earliest Levantine chiefdom level societies evolved in the Beersheva valley along a divergent pathway (Levy 1998). Copper production and the control of copper distribution networks seem to have fueled the Beersheva chiefdom and enabled it to evolve along its own trajectory. Gilat, and its satellite sites along the Nahal Patish (Alon 1961), contains no evidence of Chalcolithic metal production activities. Thus, Gilat seems to have used religion, ritual and pilgrimage as key factors in promoting its own growth into a regional polity. This is a clear example of Flannery and Marcus's divergent cultural evolution.
As will be shown in this study, the geographic centrality of the Gilat sanctuary in the Chalcolithic settlement pattern of Israel's northern Negev desert makes religion and ritual key variables for understanding Gilat's social evolutionary role during the Chalcolithic period. Depending on the character and material culture found at a site, any one of the cultural sub-systems outlined above could be used as an analytical lens to examine cultural change. For example, archaeological sites rich in metallurgical remains or some other technological assemblage might serve as case studies for examining the role of craft production in social change (Costin 1991; Levy et al. 2002). Alternatively, a site with extensive evidence for agro-technology (rich faunal and paleobotanical assemblages, storage facilities, agricultural installations, etc.) would be examined using various models of subsistence to reconstruct change through time. Thus, while this study focuses primarily on the Gilat ritual center, it does seek to elicit a general investigation of the role of religion and ideology on social change in 'middle range' societies.
Social Typologies and Middle Range Societies
By 'middle range' societies, we mean those intermediate societies that are neither states nor egalitarian. Whether we call these 'chiefdoms' or intermediate societies (Earle 1991b) is a 'red herring' in academic discourse today (Rousseau 2001). With regard to Palestine and other regions around the world, Norman Yoffee (Yoffee 1998) has usefully warned about the dangers of assuming teleological trends in social evolution when scholars wed themselves to social evolutionary typologies. Kent Flannery (Flannery 1999), on the other hand, has pointed out some of the innate difficulties in recognizing chiefdoms in the archaeological record and in particular, those that may have been present in the prehistoric Near East. From the simple typological perspective, we would
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argue that the use of cultural typologies by anthropologists and archaeologists is essential if they are interested in identifying cross-cultural trends related to processes of culture change and adaptation.
The critical point in conceptualizing middle range or intermediate societies is the profound change they represent in the social evolutionary history of humankind. In the Levant, which is home to over 1.4 million years of human and social evolution—one of the longest human evolutionary sequences outside of Africa—the rise of institutionalized social inequality sometime during the post-Natufian Epi-Paleolithic period (c. 10,000 BP) represents a revolutionary social transformation. The fundamental question is why did people give up their social autonomy when for more than 1.39 myr they lived in relatively autonomous hunter and forager groups? The cultural evolutionary term that best characterizes these middle range or intermediate societies that mark the emergence of institutionalized social inequality is 'chiefdom'. As Carneiro (Carneiro 1981) and Earle (Earle 1987) points out, chiefdoms are polities that centrally organize a regional population in the thousands. With the rise of chiefdoms, deep-seated changes occur in the economic, subsistence, ideological, social organization and technological sub-systems of a culture. The rise of Levantine Chalcolithic chiefdoms has been documented not only in the Beersheva valley (Levy 1987) but in a number of sub-regions due in great part to recent fieldwork in areas such as Nahal Qanah in Samaria (Gopher and Tsuk 1996, Gopher et al. 1990), Peqi'in in the Galilee (Gal, Smithline and Shalem 1997), and Tuleilat Ghassul in the lower Jordan valley (Bourke 2002; Seaton 2000) and an array of studies concerning Chalcolithic craft specialization (Levy and Shalev 1989; Shalev 1994; Shalev et al. in press, Shalev and Northover 1993) Thus, the question now is not whether chiefdoms existed during the Chalcolithic, but rather, how did they emerge, maintain themselves, evolve and collapse. This study, which focuses on one of the few Chalcolithic regional ritual sites will try to answer this question by focusing on the ideological sub-system of a Chalcolithic culture that appeared in the northern Negev shortly after the end of the once vibrant Neolithic communities of the late sixth-early fifth millennium.
Early Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion. Surprisingly, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881), one of the social evolutionary founders of the comparative method, hardly dealt with the evolution of religion. As M. Harris points out (Harris 2001), Morgan shied away from studying religion because he viewed religion as 'irrational'. In this sense, Morgan was dissimilar to the other nineteenth-century social evolutionists who were deeply interested in religion.
E.B. Tylor (1832-1917) is credited with stimulating interest in anthropology as a science especially when he took up being head of the University at Oxford in 1883. As Robert Carneiro (Carneiro 1973) observed, 'Tylor showed himself to be a good deal more of a cultural historian than an evolutionist. His concern was largely with tracing the history of myths, riddles, customs, games, rituals, artifacts, and the like, rather than with lying bare the general processes or stages in the evolution of culture as a whole.' There is little doubt that Tylor's concern in building a credible museum contributed to his interest in culture history. However, he was interested in evolutionary process and this is reflected in his largest contribution—the study of animism as reflected in his 1871 book Primitive Culture: Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. Tylor (1871) defined religion as 'a belief in spiritual beings'. As a religious worldvicw, animism views human life in all moving things. In band-level societies, people would sec no distinction between the animate and the inanimate. Nature is alive in everything and represents soul. According to Bates (Bates 1996), Tylor viewed animism as a belief in a personified supernatural force and suggested that this was the first stage in the evolution of religion, which then passed through a belief in many gods, culminating with monotheism. Most recent scholars have question Tylor's theory that band-level societies could not discriminate whether things were animate or inanimate. The fallacy of Tylor's logic is his assumption that 'primitive' societies were also
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'primitive' in ritual symbols and systems. This is inherent in his book Primitive Culture (Tylor 1871) where he develops three stages of socioreligious evolution: animism > polytheism > monotheism. Animism relates to the role of the soul used to describe the belief that animate and inanimate objects, as well as human beings, can have a soul (or life force and personality) and is still used as a general descriptive term for 'tribal' religions (Bowie 2000). Modern researchers have demonstrated the complexity of rituals, symbols and myths amongst the band-level groups that go beyond Tylor's model of animism.
Using the comparative method, Sir James Frazer (1914) produced perhaps the most comprehensive study of religion at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This 12 volume magnum opus was abridged and published as The Golden Bough which is still in print. Frazer's work mostly substantiates Tylor's view that modern religions evolved naturally from 'primitive' predecessors.
Frazer (Frazer 1960) wrote
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical, namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them. Of the two, belief clearly conies first, since we must believe in the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But unless, the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but merely a theology.
According to Hams (Harris 2001), Frazer's most influential contribution was the distinction he made between religion and magic—a distinction that Tylor had ignored. Accordingly, for Frazer, magic is viewed 'as an early expression of science based on a false notion of the regularity of cause and effect processes. Religion is a higher achievement (than magic), substituting uncertainty and prayerful conciliation for misguided notions of causality. Science develops next, returning mankind to the principles of cause and effect, but on a basis of true correlations' (ibid.). In this sense, M. Eleade's study of alchemy—an activity imbued with magic—is indeed a precursor to science. Perhaps Frazer's biggest contribution was making a wealth of primitive customs intelligible to European thinkers of his time (Britannica 2002). Frazer's prolific writing had great influence on scholars of his time. However, his work is not based on original fieldwork. Instead he relied on personal contacts with colonial administrators and the clergy who traveled to the 'primitive'. However, the study of religion was central to Frazer's research as reflected in works such as Totemism and Exogamy (Frazer 1968) and Folk-lore in the Old Testament; studies in comparative religion, legend and law (Frazer 1927). The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropologists continuously debated over social evolution and core issues such as the structure of the earliest human societies and the prehistory of religion. As David Gellner (Gellner 1999) points out, some of the questions these scholars asked included:
"Was the earliest form of religion magic? Was it the worship of forces of nature? Was it belief in spirits as apprehended in dreams and visions, a form of religion labeled 'animism'? Or was it totemism, the worship by each constituent clan of the society of its own special totem (sacred object)? There was great fascination with 'primitive' society and its religion among the reading public of the nineteenth century. For some, the difference and strangeness of exotic practices confirmed them in the Tightness of their own ways. For others the historic continuity, which all believed in, between the 'primitive' and the 'modern', was a way of debunking and undermining religion as such.
Time and again, scholars return to these fundamental questions that are linked to cultural evolution and germane to the Gilat study presented here. However, social fads such as the current 'new age' interest in shamanism influence the scholarly use of nineteenth-century terms in appropriate ways. For example, it would be inappropriate to use the concept of shaman for non-hunting and gathering societies in the systematic study of religion and anthropological archaeology. As shown in the
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in-depth cross cultural studies of M, Winkelman (Winkelman 2000b, 1990) based on an autocorrelation multiple-regression analysis of ethnographic records, shamans are found in hunting and gathering societies who have a nomadic lifestyle and are found throughout the world—except in the Circum-Mediterranean and Insular Pacific regions. To apply this model to Mediterranean pastoral and/or agricultural societies would be unsuitable. This problem is taken up again in the concluding chapter of this book (Chapter 16). The history of anthropological approaches to the study of religion has received extensive scholarship (Aguilar 2000; Aigbe 1993; Anderson 1992; Baal, Beek and Scherer 1975; Bell 1992; Blanton 1966; Bowen 1998; Burris 1997; Coleman 2001; Feeley-harnik 1992; Fishbane 1993; Glazier 1997; Greenstein 1994; Gruber 1998; Hicks 2002; Krzyzaniak 1999; Lambek 2002; Remy 1991; Stewart 1998; Thorbjornsrud 2001; Wax 1991; Winkelman 2000a). In what follows, a distinct archaeology of religion is proposed which utilizes many of the contributions of anthropologists and other researchers of religion. In this way, the more recent literature and research on the anthropology of religion is addressed.
The Archaeology of Cult and Chalcolithic Palestine
If the anthropology of religion has been shown to be a complex area of inquiry, the archaeology of religion presents the researchers with an even more daunting challenge. This is mostly because the material remains of ancient cult activities are often few in numbers and open to different interpretation and debate. Hodder's (Hodder 1999) suggestion that the analysis of actual archaeological fieldwork is both subjective and objective rings true. However, by carefully outlining the assumptions that underlie the observation and description of archaeological data (whether in the field or laboratory); it is possible to reach an objective interpretation that other observers can duplicate. This should be the goal of archaeological inquiries into ancient religion and cult. With regard to these issues, fundamental questions arise such as how much material is needed to identify a cult center or locus? When is a building a domestic structure or public building? When does a structure pass the threshold of the 'profane' into the 'sacred'? What kind of reasoning is needed to identify a locale as a locus of ritual activity? In this study, we continue to follow in the footsteps of Colin Renfrew's (Renfrew 1985a) deductive approach to the archaeology of cult applied on the island of Melos where a series of hypotheses related to ritual acts were carefully outlined and tested. Renfrew (1985:11-26) provides a general framework for examining a wealth of archaeological data found at the Late Bronze Age sanctuary at Phylakopi that we built on in our preliminary study of cult activities at Gilat (Alon and Levy 1989). It is worth reviewing this framework as the new excavations at Gilat (1990-1992) provide a much larger contextual basis and sample size to examine formative ritual practices in the Chalcolithic and the rise of the first pan-regional cult centers in the southern Levant.
In Palestine, Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age religion and cult have been examined mostly in a non-systematic manner where assumptions are not clarified and quantification of data are minimal at best (Amiran 1981; Ben-Tor and Netzer 1973; Dunayevsky and Kempinski 1973; Epstein 1973, 1975, 1978, 1982, 1988, 1998; Kempinski 1972, 1987; Seton-Williams 1949; Ussishkin 1980). Since the late 1980s, a growing number of researchers have made strides to quantify and take a more explanatory perspective in studying Chalcolithic ritual (Kerner 2001; Scaton 2000). In approaching the Iron Age and early historic periods, archaeological studies of ritual and religion have made important advances to engage anthropological models, quantification and systcmization of analysis. Scholars working on these issues for the Iron Age include Dever (1987), Holladay (1987), Stager (1987), and Zevit (2001) who have all argued for a 'functionalist' approach for examining the historical and archaeological record of Palestine, especially with regard to early Israelite religion. Other studies that have built on these functionalist foundations include Alpcrt
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Nakhai (Nakhai 2001), Bloch-Smith (Bloch-Smith and Nakahi 1999; Bloch-Smith 1992), and Halpern (1998). For Middle and Late Bronze Age Cyprus, Knapp (1988) has utilized a 'structuralist' view to show how elites and other special interest groups use ideology to establish, challenge or change a specific sociopolitical order. As will be shown in this study, we have attempted to merge a wide range of these anthropological approaches to examine the formative Chalcolithic religion embedded in the archaeological record at Gilat. Some of the main issues related to formative Chalcolithic religion examined in this study and outlined in Renfrew's (1985:25-26) 'Steps in the Analysis of Prehistoric Religion' are outlined below. Like so much of Renfrew's work, this list of archaeological correlates is remarkable for its depth in tackling the links between hard archaeological data and interpretive models. Here we build on Renfrew's earlier framework for an archaeology of cult and ritual practice by addressing how the material record of societies reflects ritual practice, ideology, and the function of ritual and religion in cultural systems.
Ritual Practice: Key Questions to be Investigated
Many researchers concerned with the anthropology of religion may inappropriately use the term 'cult' as synonymous with 'ritual'. For example, in Renfrew's (1985:14ff) work entitled The Archaeology of Cult, he uses the terms 'cult' and 'ritual' interchangeably. According to the Webster's dictionary, cult refers to:
a) a system of religious worship or ritual, b) a quasi-religious group, often living in a colony, with a charismatic leader who indoctrinates members with unorthodox or extremist views, practices, or beliefs, or c) devoted attachment to, or extravagant admiration for, a person, principle, or lifestyle, especially when regarded as a fad/the cult of nudism, etc.
Based on this definition, it may be perfectly appropriate to use cult and ritual interchangeably. However, since the publication of Catherine Bell's books entitled Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Bell 1992) and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Bell 1997), it is clear that the notion of 'ritual' should be separate from 'cult' if we are to fully investigate the role of religion in societies and social evolution. As Bell (1992:16) points out, ritual is a definitive component of the different t processes that constitute the core of religion, society and culture. 'Ritualization is fundamentally a way of doing things to trigger the perception that these practices are distinct and the associations that they engender are special' {ibid. 220). Bell presents a tour de force analysis of ritual in all its anthropological, religious studies and sociological iterations. After surveying the vast literature on ritual, she establishes the significance of a 'performance approach' to the study of ritual that was initiated by Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1973) who uses ritual as a lens which 'enables one to understand the way in which people regard their religion as "encapsulated" in specific performances that can be performed for visitors and themselves.' Thus, the term 'cult' has lost its usefulness as an anthropological construct because the media and cultural studies appropriated the term to refer to those social movements that exist on the edges of normative religion and social institutions. Ritual (as defined by Bell and others) is a more useful concept for studying religion in archaeological contexts, because it is linked to the notion of performance which has a direct material correlates that can be observed in the material record. More will be said of performance theory below in relation to the archaeological record. What then are the central questions concerning ancient ritual that can be asked of the archaeological record?
Ritual Practice at Gilat, The following questions concerning to ritual practice are investigated in the various chapters of this volume. Following each question, the chapters which discuss these issues are given in parentheses.
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a) Given what is known about other late prehistoric sanctuaries in the southern Levant as well as ethnographic examples, is it possible to demonstrate the presence of a regional ritual center at Gilat? (Chapters 1, 4, 5)
b) What was the nature of cult paraphernalia used at Gilat? (Chapters 5, 10, 12, 14, 15)
c) Can local cults be distinguished from pan-regional cult practices at Gilat? (Chapters 2, 5, 3, 4, 15)
d) What was the range of offerings that were brought to Gilat and is it possible to interpret 'why' they were brought to the site? (Chapters 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15)
e) Is there evidence for a hierarchy of ritual practices at Gilat and how can this be demonstrated? (Chapters 14, 15)
f) What is the relation between ritual practice in the Gilat settlement and Chalcolithic cemeteries? (Chapter 8)
g) Is it possible to identify the frequency of ritual acts and/or quantify their occurrence at the site? (Chapters 6, 8, 10, 14, 15)
h) Is there evidence of animal and/or human sacrifice? (Chapters 5, 6, 8)
i) Can 'behavioral chains' (cf. Schiffer 1987) related to the flow and practice of ritual acts be identified in the archaeological record? (Chapters 6, 8, 10, 15)
j) Can the use of fire and/or water be identified as important elements of the ritual act? (Chapters 5, 6, 14, 15)
k) What is the range of cult images present in the archaeological record at Gilat? (Chapters 5, 12, 15)
1)   Were cult images used as votive offerings at the site? (Chapter 12, 15) m) Are their depictions of ritual scenes in the material culture at Gilat? (Chapter 5) n)   What religious and ideological symbolism can be inferred from the assemblage of cult related artifacts? (Chapter 15)
Ideology and Belief Underlying Cult and Ritual Practices at Gilat. To achieve an understanding of south Levantine ideology and belief systems, the following questions are asked of the Gilat data:
a) Were there anthropomorphic and/or zoomorphic deities at Gilat and how do they relate to the late fifth-fourth millennium Near Eastern world? (Chapters 1,6, 15)
b) Are there composite deities (part human, part animal) in the archaeological record at Gilat? (Chapter 15)
c) Was there a 'pantheon' of deities at the site? (Chapters 1, 15)
d) Can the gender role differences be detected in the cult(s) at Gilat? (Chapter 15)
e) How were people vs. animals involved in cult themes at the site? (Chapters 6, 8, 15)
f) What contextual evidence accompanies the use of symbolic artifacts at Gilat? (Chapters 1 0, 12, 15)
g) Is it possible to reconstruct prehistoric mythology based on the distribution of cult objects and their symbolism at the site? (Chapter 15)
h) What is the role (if any) of astronomy in the ritual acts at the site? (Chapters 5, 16)
i) Can a range of separate cults be identified at the site (i.e. funerary, ancestor, fertility, etc.)? (Chapter 15)
j) What ideological meaning can be gleaned from the anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and other figurative works found at Gilat? (Chapter 15)
The Role of Ritual and Religion in Chalcolithic Society. To clarify the relationship between ritual and religion within the local community at Gilat and the network of relations between Gilat as a ritual center and other Levantine regions, the following questions arc addressed in this book:
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a) Is it possible to identify the scale of investment in cult activities at Gilat? (Chapters 6, 8, 10, 15)
b) How do scalar difference in ritual acts at Gilat compare with other extensively excavated Chalcolithic sites in Israel/Palestine and Jordan? (Chapters 6, 8, 9, 12, 15)
c) "What is the nature of religious organization at Gilat and does it extend beyond the individual settlement? (Chapters 14, 15)
d) Can the organization of cult be linked to more general dimensions of social organization? (Chapters 13, 14)
e) What was the role of ritual leaders in the society? (Chapters 1, 16)
f) Is there evidence for syncretism between ritual acts carried out at Gilat and other regions in the southern Levant? (Chapters 5, 15, 16)
The Archaeological Recognition of Ritual Acts: Ritual as the Communication of Culture
Recent anthropological definitions of ritual have generally moved away from strict functionalist approaches to ones based on 'performance theory' (Austin 1975; Tambiah 1985). Performance theories, as highlighted by Robbins (Robbins 2001), are based on 'linguistic observation that certain utterances, ones that scholars classify as speech acts, do not primarily describe the world or inform people about it, but rather do something within it'. Rappaport (1999:78) uses the example of a ritual dance done by the Maring of Papua New Guinea who, by performing a special dance (kaiko ritual), establishes a pledge to ally himself with the host of the ritual. Similarly, a pledge to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' in a court of law in western society, binds the speaker to a specific behavior and relationship (to tell the 'truth'). For archaeologists, performance theory is appealing because these behaviors in space and time often leave material residues that provide a window on ancient ritual acts. This does not mean that there are no problems with the application of performance theory in anthropology.
Unlike archaeology, research trends in cultural anthropology have changed over the past two decades from 'quantitative' to 'interpretive' or 'humanistic' approaches (D'andrade 1995). This is not the place to criticize this trend. However, for archaeologists who deal with masses of material culture from the observable world, functionalist views of ritual are still extremely useful. Even performance theory, when grounded in material correlates of human behavior, can be utilized within a functionalist perspective. For example, in his earlier writings, Rappaport (Rappaport 1971) defined ritual as 'both human and animal, religious and secular—as conventional acts of display through which one or more participants transmit information concerning their physiological, psychological or sociological states either to themselves or to one or more of their participants.' Accordingly, ritual behavior is especially recognized in cultural life through its formality, its repetitive elements and the fact that it is done either publicly in the form of a gathering of people or privately in the presence of the deity (Renfrew 1985a). While it is generally assumed that ritual is linked to religious activities, it should be remembered that there are also social rituals that permeate life such as greetings, acts related to trade, exchange and other domains.
In dealing with Chalcolithic ritual in this study, it is suggested that religious and social rituals are inextricably tied together. More recently, Rappaport (Rappaport 1999) defined ritual as 'the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers'. This is a rather open-ended definition of ritual. As Robbin's (Robbins 2001) points out, most of Rappaport's (1999) magnum opus, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, consists of the 'unpacking of this definition in order to show how ritual so defined creates and/or entails all of the key features of religion and many of those of social life more generally'. However, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity falls short of the book's goal of
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presenting an objective, rigorous, deductive approach to the anthropological study of religion. For Rappaport (ibid: 3) his study is a 'treatise on ritual: first on ritual's internal logic, next on the products (like sanctity) that its logic entails, and on the nature of their truth, and finally, on the place of ritual and its products in humanity's evolution'. In Rappaport's earlier works (cf. Rappaport 1969, 1970, 1971, 1979), he was a master of analyzing and providing a framework for understanding the role of ritual an its 'products in humanity's evolution'. As Robbins (2001: 591) correctly points out, Rappaport's new work leaves deductive analysis behind and really represents Rappaport's own 'worldview' draped in a wide range of the aurhor's own assumptions about the nature of religion. For example, to understand the meaning of symbols, Rappaport (1999:1 1) explains at great length the psychology of 'the lie' and 'deceit' and how these are useful concepts for understanding symbolic behavior. This is a prime example of a researcher's own worldview (in this case Rappaport's apparent cynical view of language) that results in a coloring of his analvsis of data. Rappaport's (1969,1970,1971) earlier works concerning the role of ritual in society were based on the freshness of his experience with the ethnographic world of a small-scale society in Papua New Guinea and his engagement with hard ethnographic facts that he scrupulously collected. Thus, for the study of prehistoric religion based on large assemblages of archaeological data, the methods best suited to the identification and analyses of ritual are based on the quantitative and contextual analyses of artifacts interpreted as 'cultic' that can be studied in relation to functional theories of religion as described here.
Ritual Acts and Archaeological Correlates
The most definitive archaeological study of prehistoric religion is Colin Renfrew's 'Towards a Framework for the Archaeology of Cult Practice' (Renfrew 1985b). The Gilat study presented here of the emergence of one of the first pan-regional ritual centers in the southern Levant draws very heavily on Renfrew's framework. Simply put, Renfrew has laid the foundation for studying prehistoric temple/sanctuary religion (at the Phylakopi Late Bronze Age sanctuary in the Aegean) and now, with the wealth of ritual data recovered at Gilat, we can help build the framework for an archaeological study of ritual process and social change.
Renfrew published his framework for the archaeological study of cult around the same time that Tambiah's (1985) Culture, Thought, and Social Action: An Anthropological Perspective appeared, and helped make performance theory a popular 'mini-paradigm' in cultural anthropology. For Renfrew (1985:18), the essence of religious ritual is 'the performance of expressive actions of worship and propitiation of the human celebrant towards the transcendent being' yet he seems to have been unaware of the growing appreciation of 'performance' in the analysis of ritual bv cultural anthropologists at that time (cf. Ahern 1979; Finnegan 1969; La Fontaine 1977). However, Renfrew relied on Melford Spiro's seminal definition of religion that foreshadows the establishment of the performance theory mini-paradigm. For Spiro (1966), religion can be defined as 'culturally patterned interactions with culturally postulated superhuman beings'. Herein lies the link between the performance of ritual acts, the religious sub-system of a culture and material correlates for these behaviors. The range of ritual acts that may leave a material 'signature' includes a) attention focusing, b) the presence of 'liminaP zones (cf. Turner 1995 f J 969]), c) presence of deity and associated symbolic focus, and d) participation and offering. In 1987, we conducted our first joint excavation at Gilat with the aim of clarifying the stratigraphy of the site and laying the groundwork for future large-scale excavations that took place from .1990 to 1992 (see Chapter 5, this volume). The short 1987 season enabled us to present a preliminary study of the archaeology of cult at Gilat in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology (Alon and Levy 1 989). The following discussion builds on that publication and lists the various chapters where these correlates arc identified and
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examined. Based on the dimensions of ritual behavior discussed here, the following material correlates have been suggested by Renfrew (1985) and modified for the Gilat study:
1) Ritual activities may occur in association with natural environmental features in a landscape (i.e. a hilltop, a spring, a mountain top, a grove of trees—Chapters 1, 5, 16).
2) A special building may be established for ritual acts (Chapter 5).
3) Ritual may involve 'conspicuous public display' in areas such as public courtyards, or 'hidden exclusive mysteries' where only select individuals may view ritual in secret rooms, grottos, etc; both of these dimensions of cult have an architectural signature (Chapters 5, 14, 15).
4) Ritual acts of worship may be reflected in iconography or imagery (Chapters 12, 15).
5) To induce religious experience, different devices may be used such as dance, music, drugs and alcohol. Iconography, musical instruments and residue studies can help identify this (Chapter 12).
6) The locus of ritual acts and cult paraphernalia used at a site may utilize attention-focusing devices identifiable in the architecture and mobile equipment in the facility (Chapters 5, 10, 15).
7) The presence of deities may be indicated by cult images at the site (Chapter 15).
8) The locus of ritual acts may have special installations for these activities such as altars, special benches, favisa, pools, basins, special hearths, and libation pits (Chapter 5).
9) Ritual acts may include animal and/or human sacrifice (Chapters 5, 6, 8).
1 0) Evidence for feasting rituals may be represented by special patterns of food and drink remains (cf. Dietler and Hayden 2001) that may represent offerings (Chapters 6, 10, 16).
11) Evidence of votive offerings may be present, some of which were intentionally broken (Chapters 12, 15).
12) Portable equipment may have been used for ritual acts (i.e. incense burners, special lamps, etc.—Chapters 10, 12).
13) Sacred areas may be identified at the site if symbolic artifacts are found, contextually, in large numbers (redundancy—Chapters 5, 10, 11, 12).
14) The symbols found at the site will often link deities worshipped with iconographic representation (Chapter 15).
15) Symbolism may be reflected in funerary architecture, the placement of the dead and grave offerings (Chapter 8).
16) Concepts of ritual cleanliness and pollution may be reflected in the animal remains at the site, the disposal of rubbish, and the general maintenance of the perceived sacred area (cf. Pearson 2000).
17) Ritual equipment should reflect a significant investment of wealth (i.e. in terms of procurement, 'value', manufacture, etc.—Chapters 12, 14, 15).
18) Architecture used for ritual should demonstrate a significant investment of wealth and resources (Chapter 5).
Test Expectations for Ritual Activities at Gilat
To analyze the wealth of ritual artifacts found at Gilat and described in this volume, we have attempted to establish a consistent theoretical framework for studying ritual behavior in the archaeological record at the site. A framework for analyzing ritual is done by suggesting seven general classes of data along with contextual evidence, provenance studies, and cross-cultural ethnographic parallels in concert with Renfrew's criteria outlined above. Generalized test expectations are made for identifying ritual activities at Gilat.
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Worship and Space. While it is difficult to 'prove' that a natural environmental feature such as a mountain top was the locus of ritual activity, the human-built environment offers greater possibilities. The architectural plan of a suspected sanctuary or ritual site should show similarities with contemporary temples or sanctuary architecture from the research area. In the Negev desert example described in this book, following the 1990-1992 excavations, it is now possible to trace the evolution of ritual space at the site through six of the seven occupation phases at the site (Strata IIA-IV; e.g. Chapter 5). If similarities can be established, this would help locate special buildings, facilities and open spaces used for ritual activities at the site. Based on a study of the architectural elements of the site with mobile artifacts, it should be possible to locate where hidden vs. more public ritual activities took place. These distinctions should help clarify the organization of ritual practices and the site and their ramifications for socioeconomic activities.
Ritual Practices. Within the context of the site, the material correlates for ritual acts should focus on the loci of specific cult activities within the proposed sacred area; e.g. courtyards, rooms, platforms, altars, benches, standing stone features, special hearths and storage facilities. In addition, evidence for the cartage and possible consumption of offerings such as food, drink and exotic substances should be identifiable in the suspected ritual areas.
Religious Experience. Evidence for religious or ritual experience by the ancient population maybe reflected on depictions of dance or processions on artifacts and architecture, musical instruments, paleobotanical and chemical residues (of drugs, incense, alcoholic beverages, and precious commodities such as olive oil) and receptacles that may have been used to transport special substances to the ritual center. While objects specifically reflecting dance and music have not been recognized at Gilat, a large assemblage of portable ceramic and stone fenestrated stands (Chapters 10 and 12) have been found. Special ceramic vessels for the transport of rare olive oil have been isolated at Gilat (Chapter 10). These objects are examined in this study in conjunction with ethno-historical data from the Negev Bedouin and ancient textual data (from the Hebrew Bible, Mcsopo-tamian and other sources) that may shed light on the use of these objects to facilitate religious experiences.
Attention-Focusing Devices. The lay-out of buildings, large platforms, altars, benches and other architectural features can help in inducing and enhancing religious and ritual experiences by helping to focusing the attention of the participants. In addition, portable equipment such as statuettes and figurines would have played a significant role (cf. Chapter 15). The contextual evidence of these portable objects within the sacred space at a site should provide evidence of attention-focusing activities.
Cult Images. Figurines (not toys), statuettes, statues and other forms of figurative 'art' can convey information concerning omnipotent powers and the numinous; these artifacts should contain symbols that highlight the ideology, beliefs, and concerns of the people who made these objects. In non-industrial societies these concerns might focus on fertility, the nature of deities, success in hunting and herding, agriculture, husbandry and fecundity. One way of identifying these concerns and possibly the deities worshipped is to compare the symbolic content of statuettes and figurative art with the socioeconomic dimensions of the prehistoric or pre-industrinl society under study. Peltenberg (Peltenburg et al. 1988) suggests it is possible to identify a cult image as opposed to a votive on the basis that the former should have a special, 'less-touched', status (implying worship) than the former, which may have been manipulated more often. Thus, paint and/or delicate manufacture and features may be better preserved on a cult image than on a votive
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The study of cult images can be linked to what Merlin Donald (1991) in his book Origins of the Modem Mind refers to as the concept of 'external symbolic storage'—that is devices outside the human body evolved specifically or unconsciously to contain and communicate information. In terms of human cognition, this represents a fundamental advance in human evolution. By tracking the evolution of 'external symbolic storage', Donald presents a model of how symbols are used and evolve in the course of human evolution In a conference devoted to this concept and published in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (Renfrew and Scarre 1998), the notion of 'external symbolic storage' is fully explored by archaeologists and anthropologists in relation to material culture. In discussing the evolution of human cognition, Donald (1991) outlines three general cognitive phases and transitions:
a) Episodic culture, which is characteristic of primate cognition (First transition)
b) Mimetic culture, characteristic of Homo erectus (Second transition)
c) Linguistic or mythic culture, characteristic of early Homo sapiens (Third transition)
Briefly, Donald suggests that mythic culture emerged during the Upper Paleolithic with the origins of visuographic representation, and extended well into Neolithic societies that foreshadow the urban world. Renfrew (1998), although appreciative of Donald's cognitive framework, criticises the fact that while Donald notes the importance of the Upper Paleolithic visuographic achievements, and highlights the role of writing systems in Mesopotamia as external symbolic storage, he neglects how middle range societies utilized this concept in their cultural evolution. Renfrew (ibid: 4), in his inimitable way, embellishes Donald's cognitive framework by linking external symbolic storage specifically with middle range societies:
a) Episodic culture, characteristic of primate cognition (First transition)
b) Mimetic culture, characteristic of Homo erectus (Second transition)
c) Linguistic or mythic culture, characteristic of early Homo sapiens (Third transition)
d) External symbolic storage employing symbolic material culture, characteristic of early agrarian societies with permanent settlements, monuments and valuables (Fourth transition)
e) Theoretic culture using sophisticated information retrieval systems for external symbolic storage, usually in the form of writing, frequently in urban societies.
As the Chalcolithic period in the Levant is characterized by the rise of middle range societies (Levy 1998), the cognitive dynamics underlying the evolution of external symbolic storage are significant when viewed against the background of other fundamental changes at this time including the rise in human population, transformations in agro-technology, pyro-technology (metallurgy and ceramics), and the general fabric of Levantine societies at this time. In Chapter 15, Commenge and others explore the symbolic dimensions of the Gilat figurative art in great detail.
Repetition.
Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1778)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
One cult object does not make a ritual site. It is the repetition of material remains linked to a range of ritual activities that provides the kind of evidence that archaeologists need to separate the sacred from everyday domestic activities and to be certain of identifying an ancient sanctuary in the archaeological record. In addition, the contextual patterns of ritual objects and the distribution of special function artifacts in large quantities and in specific loci (e.g. courtyards, small room, basins,
1 6    ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULT
hearths, and other features) may point to the practice of ritual acts such as the burning of incense, worship, adoration, pilgrimage, and the preparation of special substances.
Ceremonial Centers, Exchange and Ethnohistory. A ceremonial 'service center' for ritual activities should contain evidence for widespread contacts with a hinterland. In chiefclom societies, when there is a lack of economic control, as would be evidenced by land ownership or centralized storage, ritual and religion can be parlayed into power and prestige. As Tim Earle (I 99 1 a) points out, in these cases, populations, such as those in Mesoamerica or the Mississippi valley, seem to have been drawn into 'sociopolitical systems in part through manipulated "smoke and mirrors", an ideology of religiously sanctioned centrality symbolized by the ceremonial constructions and exchanges in foreign objects of sacred significance'. The archaeological evidence for exchange in ritual-related objects should reflect gifts or offerings brought to the site that highlight a concern with religion; e.g. statuettes, figurines, votives, non-local foodstuffs and 'special objects". Provenance studies, residue analyses, and the quantification of artifacts interpreted as 'cultic' and found in the ritual center should help in detecting the direction of exchange, how the hinterland connected the regional ritual network, the extent of flow of cult objects to the site and the overall sphere of influence of the ceremonial center. Finally, a ritual center should also have functioned as a center of pilgrimage. Local and cross-cultural ethnographic and historical data concerning why a pilgrimage system may have emerged, how it functioned, and its role in the wider society can be of paramount importance for helping to understand the archaeology of ritual. In the Negcv case study described in this book, a range of carefully selected studies by cultural anthropologists working in the Negev desert (Israel—Yoram Bilu, Chapter 4), Bedouin from the Sinai peninsula (Egypt— Emanuel Marx, Chapter 3) and small-scale swidden agriculturalists from Papua New Guinea (Donald Tuzin, Chapter 2) are presented and used to help provide processual models of ritual and society that are germane to the analyses of middle range societies represented ar Gilat.
Ancient ethnohistorical documents can provide another source of important data for interpreting the archaeological record related to ritual. For the study of formative ritual centers, such as the Negev Chalcolithic example presented here, the earliest local ethnohistoric document is the Hebrew Bible. While the Hebrew Bible was codified sometime around the seventh and sixth centuries BCE (cf. Friedman 1987), millennia removed from the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500-3600 BCE), it does represent some of the earliest insights into pre-industrial societies that lived, worshipped and interacted with the local southern Levantine environment. Another important source of ethnohistoric data, but from further to the north in Syro-Mcsopotamia are Ugaritic texts which scholars such as Liverani (1993, 1999) have used to build detailed socioeconomic reconstructions of the northern Levant. Important socioeconomic and subsistence data are embedded in the Hebrew Bible that has been extrapolated to understand the religious traditions reflected in the Iron Age archaeological record (cf. Zevit200J). From an Annalcs perspective, the long-term processes (la longue duree) of south Levantine geo-history and environment both enabled and constrained social change in similar ways throughout the pre-industrial past. Thus, much can be learned from the Hebrew Bible, the ethnographies of the 'Holy Land', and the early historical texts found both in the Levant and neighboring regions about how people used ideology and religious belief to interact with their environment. While paleoenvironmental changes did occur from the Chalcolithic though the Iron Age period in the Levant (Goldberg and Rosen 1987), the fluctuations were not enormous and only several hundreds of millimeters of average annual rainfall (Fig. 1.2). Thus, any historical evidence of how the religious traditions of ancient agriculturalists and pastoralists interact with their environment can provide compelling models for late prehistory.
EXPLORING RELIGION IN FORMATIVE MIDDLE RANGE SOCIETIES
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Figure 1.2. Mean Annual Rainfall, N. Negev,
The Role of Ethnography for Studying Late Prehistoric Levantine Religion
Perhaps the earliest systematic use of ethnographic data for the analysis of ancient Levantine religions is the structural approach by W. Robertson Smith 1998 (Orig. 1889), 1903 (Orig. 1885), 1956 (Orig. 1889) in various works published in the late nineteenth century. Robertson Smith falls into the category of nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists who made one of the first in-depth studies of a restricted body of ethnographic data concerning one group—Semites. As Harris (2001) notes, Robertson Smith was closer to modern structural-functionalist standards than anything produced up to that time through his detailed studies of feasting, ritual communion and sacrifice. The analysis linked these ancient Semitic religious rituals to social adaptation and social solidarity. In many respects, this work foreshadows Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life which explains ritual (especially Australian totemic systems) in functionalist terms. According to Turner (J 991), 'it is often difficult to distinguish between the Durkheimian conception of religion as social cement and the Marxist metaphor of religion as a social opium.' Yet, as will be shown from the Gilat data, the functional role of ritual and religion in promoting social solidarity cannot be ignored.
One of the criticisms of Robertson Smith is that his analysis was based upon insubstantial and unreliable data (Hamilton 2001). That said, there is much to be gained through his research. Robertson Smith was a Scottish Biblicist and Arabist whose command of ancient and modern Semitic languages still gives his work great authority (Propp 1999). In approaching the religion of the ancient Semites in the southern Levant, he argued against using Mesopotamian religion as the starting point for the analysis (Robertson Smith 1998 [1889]) primarily because the bulk of the Mesopotamian data available then (and now for that matter) relates to highly urban cultures. Instead, Robertson Smith argued:
the right point of departure for a general study of Semitic religion must be sought in regions where, though our knowledge begins at a later date, it refers to a simpler state of society, and where
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accordingly the religious phenomena revealed to us are of an origin less doubtful and a character less complicated. In many respects the religion of heathen Arabia, though we have few details concerning it that are not of post-Christian date, exhibits an extremely primitive character, correspondi ng to the primitive and unchanging character of nomadic life. And with what may be gathered from this source we must compare, above all, the invaluable notices, preserved in the Old Testament, of the religion of the small Palestinian states before their conquest by the great empires of the east.
If we filter out the nineteenth-century judgmental tone of Robertson Smith's writing, it is possible to appreciate the importance of ethnographic data from small-scale societies of the southern Levant and Arabian Peninsula for establishing closer links to local ethnohistorical documents (e.g., the Hebrew Bible). This relates to the notion of 'correspondence theory' between symbolic representations of the social world and patterns of conduct discussed below with regard to the analysis of regional cults. Scholars would have to wait almost 25 years before the first intensive, systematic, ethnographic surveys were made in the region by scholars such as Alois Musil (1868-1944) (1907, 1908, 1927a, 1927b). As Ernest Gellner (1995) points out,
As an Old Testament scholar, he [Alois Musil] explored the toponymy of the Bible. For instance, he became convinced that the real Mount Sinai was somewhere east of Aqaba, a volcanic hill unrelated to the mountain now so named. This seems to make sense: people fleeing from Egypt were hardly likely to ascend an arid and high mountain located on the way back to Egypt. A site cast of the Gulf of Aqaba is far more plausible. At about the same time as Malinowski was absorbing the philosophical ideas of Ernst Mach, which then helped him to transform anthropology from a speculative-historical-genetic discipline into a synchronic-social one, Alois Musil was similarly switching from a concern with the Arabian desert as the locale of the Old Testament to an interest in its current inhabitants: at the center of his interest were the roots of monotheism in social experience rather than in revelation. It was really the same movement of thought: the social role, not historic origin, provides the real explanation.
Seen in this perspective the early twentieth-century ethnographers provide important structural and functional links between ritual acts and social solidarity amongst pre-industrial Levantine peasant (Canaan 1979 [Orig. 1927]) and nomadic societies. These sources of data provide a rich harvest for archaeologists' interest in linking the late prehistoric archaeology of ritual with the dynamics of culture change.
While the Levant has undergone accelerated culture change and these small-scale societies are rapidly losing their traditions, as shown in the ethnographic by Abu Rab'ia (1994, 200 J; Bar-Zvi, Abu-Rab'ia and Kressel 1998), Bar-Zvi (1977), Ben-David (1981), Lancaster (1997), Marx (1967, 1977b, 1977c) and others, there are still rich insights to be gained concerning the relationship between environment, social organization and ritual amongst these contemporary Negev and Sinai peoples. In this volume, Emanuel Marx (Chapter 3) presents a detailed summary of his research concerning communal and individual pilgrimage amongst some of the Sinai Bedouin and its relation to saints' tombs and pilgrimage practices. In terms of culture process, the insights gleaned by Marx-highlight the role of religious ritual as a force of social consolidation and provide an important model for understanding late prehistoric pilgrimage in the nearby Negev desert.
Cultural anthropologists Donald Tuzin (Chapter 2) and Yoram Bilu (Chapter 4) present two different regional ethnographic studies that have important processual implications on the role of ritual in structuring and transforming social institutions and change. Tuzin's (1976, I 980) original research amongst the Ilahita Arapesh of Papua New Guinea represents one of the last cases of ethnographic research in that region before the widespread adoption of Christianity. Consequently, Tuzin's observations offer a unique record of a traditional tribal-scale society's interaction with population pressure, cognition and ritual that led to the emergence of one of the first regional cult centers in that part of Papua New Guinea. In search of a similar processual issue—how to explain the rise of a contemporary regional cult center—Yoram Bilu explores this problem in the modern
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Israeli town of Netivot in the northern Negev desert, approximately 7 km northeast of Gilat. Bilu's long-term interest in modern Jewish saints in Moroccan-Israeli society provides a unique opportunity to study the rise (Ben-Ari and Bilu; Bilu 1988; Bilu and Ben-Ari 1992) of a cult center in the immediate vicinity of Gilat, While the scale of modern Israeli Sephardic society and late prehistoric Chalcolithic societies is in no way equivalent, the processual underpinnings of Bilu's investigation of how a regional cult center emerged in this Negev desert town provide an important local contextual source for hypothesis-building about possible similar processes in the same area, and about a traditional ethnic group (mostly Sephardic Jews) who reinterpret ancient (Biblical) textual precepts concerning pilgrimage. Bilu's work also provides general anthropological models of ritual.
Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Anthropological Perspective
Our preliminary studies of Gilat have shown that the site was a center for a range of cult activities, amongst which pilgrimage played an important role (Alon and Levy 1987,1989,1990,1996a and b; Levy 1992; Levy (ed.) 1997; Levy and Alon 1991,1993a, 1993b, 1995; Yellin, Levy and Rowan 1996). In this section, we describe the social significance of pilgrimage in anthropological perspective with special attention to the Levant. Pilgrimage can best be defined as a journey made by a pilgrim to a shrine or holy place' (Neufeldt and Guralnik 1991). In this context, a pilgrim is a person who travels to a shrine or holy place as a religious act (ibid.). From an anthropological perspective, pilgrimage should be examined in relation to the use of what is perceived to be 'sacred space'. There is a rich literature on the anthropology and geography of pilgrimage that can only be touched on here (cf. Bilu 1988; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Eickelman and Piscatori 1990; Morinis 1992; Sallnow 1981; Singh and Singh 1987; Sopher 1967; Weingrod 1990; Werbner 1977b, 1989) and there are a growing number of archaeological studies on this subject (Coleman and Eisner 1994; Hammond and Bobo 1994; Harbison 1994; Petersen 1994; Ray; Silverman 1994; Stopford 1994). The Gilat study presented here goes beyond many of the earlier studies concerning the archaeology of pilgrimage, especially with regard to the Middle East, by presenting one of the largest assemblages of artifacts that can be linked to trade and pilgrimage for the late prehistoric periods. For example, Yuval Goren's (Chapter 9, this volume) petrographic analysis of torpedo jars and other ceramic vessels provides important data concerning the provenance of these objects and the range and direction of exchange to the Gilat ritual center. Amongst other topics, Commenge et a/.'s (Chapter 10, this volume) detailed analysis of the entire ceramic assemblage demonstrates not only the on-site contextual meanings of ceramics linked to ritual, but their possible role in pilgrimage. Finally, components of the special ground stone assemblage (cf. Rowan et al., Chapter 12, this volume) such as violin figurines, palettes and figurative objects are shown by Commenge et al. (Chapter 15, this volume) to have played an important role not only in ritual at Gilat, but also in the direction and organization of pilgrimage networks during the Chalcolithic period.
In studying the anthropology of pilgrimage, some of the more significant contributions have tried to present models that are cross-culturally valid. The main question is whether this should be the ultimate goal of an archaeological study rooted in one cultural-historic part of the world (here the Middle East). For example, M, Eliade (1971) deals with the universal notion of sacred space and suggests that all sacred spaces are conceptualized as being centers of the universe, locales where the godly and human can meet and interact. Eliade proposes that sacred spaces are equivalent to 'the cosmic navel' and are linked by three domains: the underworld (hell), the earth and heaven. However, as Seth D. Kunin (1998) points out, the main problem with Eliade's approach relates to his linkage between myth, culture and time—'He overemphasizes the cyclical understanding of myth and time, seeing many aspects of the sacred and sacred space as attempts to mirror this cycle, with myth, ritual, and sacred space seeking to return time to its sacred mythological beginnings.
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This concept shapes many aspects of his analysis of sacred spaces.' Simply put, as not all cultures perceive sacred space in the same manner, it behooves the archaeologist/anthropologist to explore the unique historical and archaeological context in its own terms.
Although a religious studies scholar, Harold Turner (1979) made an enduring study of sacred space from a cross-cultural perspective where he suggests two basic categories: domus dei and domus ecclesiae. While these two distinctions are useful, they are too general and 'church-centric'. According to Kunin (1998) Turner's analysis is embedded in 'theological ethnoccntricity' where the domus ecclesiae is consistently given preference in his work.
Victor Turner (1969, 1986; Turner and Turner 1978) was perhaps the single most influential anthropologist to have opened up the study of pilgrimage. Turner emphasized what he felt were the cross-culturally valid concepts of limnality (discussed above) and communitas, which, he believed, were present in all pilgrimages regardless of cultural venue. For Turner, communiias meant 'commonness of feeling' by the social group involved in rituals such as pilgrimage. With regard to ritual centers, Turner says, 'At major pilgrim centers, the quality and degree of the emotional impact of the devotions (with are often continuously performed, night and day), derive from the union of the separate but similar emotional dispositions of the pilgrims converging from all parts of a huge socio-geographical catchment area' (Turner and Turner 1978). The concept of communitas, as used by Turner for rituals such as pilgrimage, can be likened to Durkheim's (1995 [Orig. 1912]) view of religion as functioning to promote the sentiments underlying social solidarity. Indeed, communitas may be the singular factor that crosscuts the role of pilgrimage in all societies regardless of time or place. In our study of late prehistoric pilgrimage, we assume that communitas was one of the primary forces that underlay the performance of rituals that brought people from distance of up to 150 km on pilgrimage to Gilat.
Ritual Centers
To understand the centrality of ritual in promoting social change it is important to under what a religious center is and how it articulates with its hinterlands. Anthropologists and geographers provide a number of important concepts and tools concerning these issues that will help us flesh out these relationships. Over the past 30 years, it has been recognized that one of the structural characteristics that distinguishes chiefdom societies (and ultimately state level organizations) from less complex social systems is that they geographically transcend the local autonomy characteristic of the autonomous camp and village settlement patterns characteristic of band level and segmentary societies. As Carneiro (1981) points out, 'a chiefdom is an autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief and 'chiefdoms have capital villages or towns that tend to be significantly larger than any other settlement in the political unit' (1981:54). The centers that coordinated these economic, social and ritual activities did not necessarily carry out all of these functions. Some may have specialized in trade redistribution of goods (Renfrew 1982); others may have focused on social integration (Earle 1978), and still others on ritual (Earle 1987; Yoffee 2001). The functional variability of chiefly centers foreshadows developments in urban society and docs not necessarily relate to the absolute size of settlement.
For urban settlements, Richard Fox (1977) suggests that a city is a location where specific functions take place, and if those functions take place, that locale is a city, irrespective of size. For Fox, what is needed for a locale to be classed as a 'city' is for a number of centralized activities to occur that fall into three distinct categories corresponding to political, ritual and economic domains. Accordingly, he constructs an idealized typology of cities that emphasize each of these aspects: what he calls the regal-ritual city, the administrative city, and the mercantile city. While the Gilat study focuses on middle range societies, this urban anthropological construct provides a
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functional model that can used to conceptualize the range of 'services' that can characterize middle range societies. Thus, while a Chalcolithic chiefly center such as Shiqmim functioned primarily to coordinate social and economic activities, Gilat was a 'ritual/religious center'. According to David Sopher (1967) 'sacred places become religious centers as simple ethnic religious systems evolve into more complex ones. The religious centers, which become the primary foci of sanctity, may supplant the diffuse sacred places of the preceding simple religions, or they may merely supplement them.' In this context, we may define 'ritual/religious center' as playing an ideological role in the middle range settlement system. This evolves from the prestige and status the elite in a settlement system obtain from being linked to the organization of ritual. These 'ritual/religious centers' primarily function as ceremonial centers and the importance of this role may not be commensurate with their economic position or political power. Ritual cannot be measured quantitatively. Middle range society 'ritual/religious centers' are places that provide housing to the ritual leaders and their retinue, and sanctuary for the surrounding hinterland linked to the ritual system. Ritual/religious centers are able to obtain regional resources because their ceremonial nature is seen as necessary for the well being of the larger social system embedded in the ritual network. Examples of these are found at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (Yoffee 2001), the nineteenth-century Nuuchalnulth Ahousaht of Clayoquot Sound along the Northwest Coast (Hayden 1995), the Early and Middle Formative periods in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico (Blanton et al. 1999; Marcus and Flannery 1996), and many other regions.
Geography and Ritual: The Northern Negev, Paleoecology and Ethnohistory Geographic Considerations. If time and space are archaeology's most precious commodities, the works of David E. Sopher (Singh and Singh 1987; Sopher 1967, 1968, 1997) concerning the geography of religion and pilgrimage represent a small treasure-trove. Born in 1923 in Shanghai, China, and of Sephardic Bagdadian Jewish background, he received all of his degrees in geography at U.C. Berkeley where he was a doctoral student of Carl O. Sauer (1889-1975). Although a specialist of South Asian cultural geography, religion and pilgrimage, he had a deep appreciation of the Hebrew Bible and it's the links between ritual and ecology. Consequently, we draw on Sopher's (1967) geographical treatment of religion here, especially with regard to the southern Levant. Religious sub-systems of culture are characterized by a number of spatial features whose identification can help archaeologists (such as those engaged in the Gilat study) move from the static archaeological record to the dynamics (cf. Binford 1982, 1983) of cultural systems. Some of the features of religious systems that are explored in this book include: a) spatial distribution in time (social-temporal context) and space (geographic context); b) an organizational network; and c) processes used by the religious sub-system to grow territorially (and in number), and d) elements which promote stability and steady states. While the environmental context in which cultural and religious systems evolved is central to understanding these phenomena, we are clearly aware of the dangers of environmental determinism (Erickson 1999; Frenkel 1992; Wright 1993). However, the further one moves in space or back in time from places and periods where industrialized technology 'rules the roost'—the more important local ecology becomes to people and their natural environment. It is in this spirit that cultural geography is used at the end of this study (Chapter 16).
Local geographical Setting. Gilat is situated in the northern Negev desert of Israel—a region characterized by a semi-arid environment (Ben-Dor et al. 2002; Evenari, Shanan and Tadmor 1982), consists of three geomorphologic zones: the Gaza or Negev coastal plain, the foothill zone, and the northern Negev upland zone (Israel. Ma*hle*ket ha-medidot 1970; Nir 1978). A detailed discussion of the modern environmental setting of the northern Negev can be found in Levy and Goldberg (1987).
22    ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULT
There are two distinct trends in the distribution of average annual rainfall across the northern Negev (one east-west, the other north-south) that have played a critical role in cultural ecology of both pastoral nomads and agriculturalists in the region. Over very short distances (less than 100 km), major environmental zones change from semi-arid to arid desert zones. The highest average annual rainfall values (c. 400 mm) are found along the Negev coastal plain at the city of Gaza. Rainfall quantities drop markedly as one moves c. 45 km southeast to the city of Beersheva where the average annual values are c. 200 mm. A further 40 km east of Beersheva, the rainfall values drop to c. 140 mm at the modern town of Arad (Meteorological Service 1967). Similarly, there is a north-south rainfall gradient with high semi-arid average annual rainfall values at the city of Kiriyat Gat (c. 425 mm) to c. 200mm at Beersheva 40 km to the south, and c. 120 mm at Kibbutz Revavim 201 km south of Beersheva. Inter-annual variability in rainfall is also a key factor in determining the stability of agro-pastoral systems. Water is the key to animal, plant and human survival in the desert and the availability of average annual rainfall plays a key role in the distribution of vegetation, animals and humans in this landscape. Thus, the question arises, just how different was the northern Negev climate during the Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods? Paleoenvironmental data from paleolimnological studies of the Dead Sea (Hall 1996; Neev and Emery 1967; Neev and Hall 1977), sediment analyses of the Nile delta and Eastern Mediterranean basin (Butzer 1997, 2002; Stanley 2002, 2001), geomorphology in the Negev and Levant (Goldberg and Rosen 1987; Rosen 1995; Wilkinson 1996, 1999, 2000), fossil land snails from the Negev (Goodfriend J 990, 1991, 1992; Goodfriend and Magaritz 1988), and fossil pollen (Horowitz 1974, 1979, 1989) from the Levant, all point to an increase of c. 100-150 mm of average annual rainfall during the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic periods. Thus, given the available paleoenvironmental data, it can be assumed that the same general semi-arid environmental parameters would have operated for late prehistoric agriculturalists and pastoralists in the northern Negev as today. However, given more humid conditions, it can be assumed that there was less inter-annual variability in mean annual rainfall.
Gilat's location (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2) at the boundary of two of these zones (the Negev coastal plain and inland foothill zone) played a key role in its development. The rainfall patterns outlined above coincide with the three major geomorphologic zones mentioned earlier. Briefly, the Negev coastal plain extends from 0 m amsl along the Mediterranean littoral to an altitude of c. 80-140m amsl to the east. The Negev coastal plain is characterized by an extensive, relatively flat, plain consisting primarily of loessial soils that provide the best year-round grazing lands in the Negev desert as a whole (Dan et al. 1976; Danin, Orshan and Zohary 1975). A wide range of plants suitable for grazing is found here (Danin 1983). Most of the Negev coastal plain has been cultivated for hundreds of years making it almost impossible to reconstruct the natural vegetation. The presence of large quantities of sand in the soil matrix here contributes to more dense vegetation dominated by Artemisia monosperma and other psammophytes. To the west, the inland foothill zone of the Northern extends from c. 140 m amsl in the west to c. 550 m amsl in the cast. This region is dominated by Eocene chalk hills and lowland trough-shape valleys filled with loessial soils (Nir 1978; Picard and Solomonica 1936) that were re-deposited during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods (Goldberg and Rosen 1987). The geomorphologic history (Levy 1 998; Levy and Alon 1987) of the natural terraces along these valleys show that during the Chalcolithic period they provided rich agricultural soils for the Beersheva valley farmers who used hoe-based cultivation methods to grow mostly barley, some wheat and some legumes. These two areas represent an 'ecotone'—a transition zone between two structurally different environments. Gilat's ecotonal setting along the 'fault-line' of the rich annual grazing lands along the Negev coastal plain and the more arid, inland foothill zone was an important factor in promoting its prominence as a regional ritual center. As Sahlins (1968) points out:
EXPLORING RELIGION IN FORMATIVE MIDDLE RANGE SOCIETIES
23
the chiefdom economy usually develops...toward more diversification...the independent political group is set across the ecological grain, incorporating the range of landscapes normally encountered in the general area... Spread over a hundred square miles, a chiefdom is likely to encompass greater environmental variety than is included in the few square miles of village domain. Moreover, a chiefdom has the means to organize, or at least tolerate, localized adaptations to the medley of its environmental opportunities.
As will be shown in this study, Gilat's unique ecotonal setting created a range of quite different environmental factors that contributed to its role in the late fifth-early fourth millennium social evolution in the Levant. For example, adaptation to the northern Negev's trough-shaped valleys was shown to be a critical factor in promoting agro-technological change and the rise of the Beersheva valley Chalcolithic chiefdom (Levy 1992a). At Gilat, oneway of achieving greater social integration on the regional scale was to develop the site into one of the southern Levant's earliest regional cult centers. The nature of 'regional cults' is discussed in the next section.
Regional Cults
Anthropologist Richard Werbner (Werbner 1977b), perhaps more than any other scholar, has promoted the analysis of cult by situating it as a regional phenomenon. According to Werbner (1977a):
Regional cults are found in many parts of the world. They are cults of the middle range—more far reaching than any parochial cult of the little community, yet less inclusive in belief and membership than a world religion in the most universal form. The central places are shrines in towns and villages, by crossroads or even in the wild, apart from human habitation, where great populations from various communities or their representatives, come to supplicate, sacrifice, or simply make pilgrimage. They are cults which have topography of their own, conceptually defined by the people themselves and marked apart from other features of cultural landscapes by ritual activities.
The work by Werbner and his contributors takes up the challenge raised by Max Gluckman (1940, 1942) to analyze social change in fields of relations that cross political, economic and/or ethnic boundaries. However, they do this by considering the impact of social change due to modernization, the influence of major world religions and contemporary nationalism. From the perspective of social evolution, the phenomenon of regional cults intersects with the emergence of middle range, rank or chiefdom level societies. As discussed earlier, one of the primary characteristics that distinguishes chiefdoms from family-level band and tribal level societies is the emergence of regional polities (Johnson and Earle 1987) is that they evolve out of formerly fragmented local groups into multi-community societies. As will be shown in the Gilat study, the rise of regional cults helped provide the 'social glue' that linked widespread settlements into a communitas web that provided solutions to persistent problems related to risk management (environmental problems), warfare, the control of technology, and trade (see conclusion, Chapter 16, this volume). The anthropological analysis of regional cults by Werbner's (1977b) group moves beyond some of the assumptions of regional analysis used by historical geographers, such as Smith (1976), who assume the existence of network hierarchies in regions. The presence of ritual, settlement or any kind of spatial hierarchy must be demonstrated and not assumed. As Werbner (1977a) points out, in regional cults flows of goods, services information and people move across major political and ethnic boundaries.
The Gilat study uses many of the findings of Regional Cults to:
a) identify ritual activities that may not coincide with the spatial boundaries and hierarchies of regional and sub-regional Levantine cultures;
b) define how the regional cult web changed through time during the late fifth-fourth millennium BCE;
24    ARCHAEOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULT
c) examine how regional and local cults interact at Gilat through time;
d) define, if possible, boundedness and associated political divisions of regional cults in the southern Levant;
e) test whether the Gilat ritual center was 'extra-territorial' (i.e. an area beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any contemporary cultural group such as the Beersheva Chalcolithic chiefdom, etc.);
f) test whether Robertson Smith's (1998 [1889]) 'correspondence theory' (i.e. a correspondence between symbolic representations of the social world and patterns of conduct) exists in the archaeological record at Gilat (cf. Marx 1977a and Chapter 3 in support of this theory and Eickelman 1977; Eickelman and Piscatori 1990 against);
g) identify whether 'elitist' and/or 'egalitarian' regional cults are represented at Gilat. Elitist cults are characterized by processes which bring an elite and its public into dialectical inclusive domains...the religious center is the political one under the elite's own control. [An egalitarian regional cult]...is characteristically free of any political elite with special ritual roles in the cult'. (Werbner 1977a);
h) how does one or more cults establish a hierarchy with centralized control of regional cult services over the landscape?
Our Gilat study uses these and the works by Tuzin, Marx and Bilu presented in the following chapters to flesh out the character, function and evolution of regional cults during the formative Chalcolithic period in the southern Levant.
Concluding Remarks
Archaeology is the only source of deep-time data to examine the links between formative social evolution and changes in the history of religion. The analytical tools needed for making such an investigation must rely on social models of religion and society developed by anthropologists, sociologists and religious studies scholars. The study of ritual, with its associated material signature, provides the most important lens for documenting and analyzing these fundamental changes in human belief systems. In the study of the Gilat ritual center presented here, ritual practice (such as pilgrimage), local ethnohistoric data (from the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern texts), ethnography, and the geography of religion are used to explore these changes. To test the theoretical models of religion (Chapters 1-4) and its role in culture change, an interdisciplinary approach is used to analyze the thousands of artifacts found at this ritual center in Israel's Negev desert. A range of biological data is examined including archaeozoological remains (Chapter 6), marine and riverine molluscs (Chapter 7) and human remains (Chapter 8). What is missing in the analysis of ecofacts is a detailed study of the plant remains from the site. A limited analysis of organic residues plant and liquid remains found in select pottery vessels is presented (Chapter 10). However, earlier studies from nearby sites provide a basic understanding of the role of plants in northern Negev Chalcolithic communities' (cf. Kislev 1987). Regional exchange studies of key archaeological materials (ceramics, lithics, ground stone, and bone tools) provide crucial data sets for testing models concerning the nature of ritual at Gilat, domestic activities, pilgrimage, and the evolution of regional cult systems in the southern Levant (Chapters 9-13). The socioeconomic factors that influenced the emergence of Gilat as a regional center are explored in terms of textile and other forms of manufacture (Chapter 14). Finally, some of the cognitive dimensions underlying late fifth-early fourth millennium ritual and belief are gleaned from structural analyses of the rich assemblage of figurative artifacts from the site (Chapter 15). Taken together, it is hoped that the excavations and analyses of Gilat will contribute to the growing interest in cognitive archaeology with special regard to the emergence of religious systems that transcend the local community.
EXPLORING RELIGION IN FORMATIVE MIDDLE RANGE SOCIETIES 25
Acknowledgments
TEL would like to sincerely thank Guillermo Algaze, Joel Robbins, Donald Tuzin, and Richard Werbner for their careful reading of this chapter and their critical comments. The author accepts full responsibility for any factual or conceptual errors.
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