Monday, 14th June 2010 at 6.00 p.m.
Dr Douglas Baird (University of Liverpool)The Nature of Neolithic Religions in the Near East
The Neolithic of the Southern Levant and the Near East more generally, c. 10,000-6,000 BC, is replete with interesting evidence of distinctive ritual practices. These include plastered human skulls, decapitated animal burials, elaborately decorated ritual buildings, charnel houses, elaborate paintings and plaster reliefs of animals and people, monumental stone sculpture, and distinctive deposits in walls and under floors, often incorporating unusual artifacts or material remains in unusual fashion. Some scholars have suggested that major transformations in the nature of religious beliefs and cosmologies at this time had an important role to play in the development of the first villages and farming communities. For example, Jacques Cauvin has suggested that people at the beginning of the Neolithic were the first to conceive of the supernatural world in terms of Gods and Goddesses and that this allowed communities c. 11000 years ago to take control of the natural world. Others have suggested that the Neolithic saw significant changes in ritual practice from a world of shamans to one where practice was more institutionalised. Interpretations of Neolithic religions have seen central roles for Mother-goddesses, for phallocentrism, for the transcendence of violence and death, and for ancestor veneration. This lecture will review some of these intriguing ritual practices from the southern Levant and across the Near East, asking whether the Neolithic had a special place in the development of religion and whether reflection on these issues can inform our understanding of religion more broadly.
Dr Douglas Baird is currently Deputy Head of School of the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at University of Liverpool and Senior Lecturer in Near Eastern Archaeology. He has directed several major field projects that relate to his major research interests: The Tell esh-Shuna North excavation project investigating the development of complex societies in the southern Levant; the Konya Plain Survey a study of long term settlement history in central Anatolia; and excavations at P?narba?? and Boncuklu investigating the appearance of the earliest sedentary farming communities in central Anatolia and the florescence of elaborate material symbolism associated with these 'Neolithic' communities.
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