Archaeology provides a unique perspective on our human identity, but there is a danger of distortion. Signs of brutality are easier to recognize on a skeleton than signs of love, creaing a danger that we will pay most attention to the grim. But, surprisingly, the distortion is the other way round. We diligently airbrush out the less palatable details of prehistory to construct a pround record of achievement for national museums to present to impressionable school parties. (11)
I have not shied away from making absolute moral judgements about the behaviour of our prehistoric ancestors, whatever religious beliefs and ritual justifications they may have had. The line between unacceptable excuses and culturally validated reasons forms a major focus of my investigation in this book. Examining why, precisely, some cultural communities may develop an apparant need for behaviour like child sacrifice, or descend into a cycle of tit-for-tat massacres--why, in short, they require victimes--may help to prevent such things happening in future. (12)
There is something patronizing about such avoidance. Modern Western academics signal that our civilization is happy to accept, or even glorify, indigenous peoples so long as we only acknowledge those differences that we ourselves can cope with--a packaged exoticism.
Archaeology, like anthropology, seeks to understand the motives of people from alien cultures, and archaeologists find it even easier to suspend judgement because the cultures they study are long gone. But if we refuse to say where we stand on child casrifice among the ancient Inca of Peru, then we cannot complain about similar atrocities in our own era, and this means that we cannot learn from history. (13)
If the Neolithic "collective｀ tombs projected the idea of sharing and belonging in order to distract attention from the fact that wealth and power were actually becoming more concentrated, then the openly individualistic Beaker burials might reflect the growing confidence of the rich. As in Melanesia, it may have been thought that only the elite had souls that could join the ancestors with their personality intact. The individual identity of the majority was dissolved in death. (26)
The continuing controversy over whether it was early AMHS or Neanderthals who first developed the capacity for burial misses a crucial point. Identifying the first reverential burial is important, because burial is likely to be connected to the existence of religious belief, and the existence of religions belief has implications for intellectual development. But the attractively simple idea that the things archaeologists label ｀burials｀ actually provide good evidence for the emergence of religious sensibility among our remote ancestors is logically and fatally flawed. Absence of burial does not prove absence of religion. (35)
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The absence of regular burial from most of world prehistory may not be a symptom of preservation. It may be a signal that, for most of the time that genus Homo has been on the planet, there was a more obvious way to deal with death. (55)
From this time onward, as I have shown in the discussion of muti killing, some social anthropologists, sensitive to their discipline｀s colonialist past, began to deny, ignore the existence of, or generously reinterpret a range of human activities. These were too extreme to be condoned under the banner of amiable cultural diversity, and included clitoridectomy ..., human sacrifice and cannibalism. Arens｀ thesis was that the label "cannibal" was actually an accusation--a deliberately derogatory, and often imperialist, exercise in name-calling that had no basis in fact. Stories of cannibal kings were libels on happy forest-dwelling tribespeople. (59)
Funerary rites are a powerful way of stressing the ethnic identity of the living--an opportunity for showing outsiders that they are just that, outsiders; the Greeks, the living symbols of pyre burial, were made to be present and to understand when the Callatians were asked to name a price for giving up there reverential funerary cannibalism. To change custom would mean that the Callatian dead would be buried like Greeks--they would become Greek-like in death and the Callatians would, by degrees, lose their ancestors. With them they would then lose their history and their identity. The offer of money to change such customs was, as Darius surely know, particularly offensive as it suggests that honour can be bought and bereavement commodified. (83)
Missionary disapproval probably spurred the abandonment of reverential funerary cannibalism in many places for similar reasons. Nineteenth-century ethnographies record that non-white indigenous people in many parts of the world believed in reincarnation as whites. (84)
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Cannibalism, from being an unreflective norm of survival and competition, as among chimpanzees today, came to be imbued with certain values and elaborated in certain ways. Elaboration, meaning a correct and complicated way of doing it, implied ever more wrong ways and the latent possibility of creating a total taboo. With the advent of the food-producing revolution we call farming, the taboo came into being and spread through an increasing number of societies--societies that had discovered a new and powerful use of corpses. (85)
Not only is this closer to the truth of her own experience than the idea of a happy volunteer, it is, quite precisely, the psychological effect that those responsible for her death wanted to induce in her. The production of visceral terror in the girl as she is finally tortured to death was a principal aim of the procedure to which she was subjected. This is not described by any commentator on Ibn Fadlan as ｀sadism｀, not because what occurs is not sadistic ... but because these seems no ritual logic in torturing to death a woman whom you may later meet in the afterlife as your hostess when your dead chief invites you to dine with him. Within the metaphysical framework of a ｀suttee｀-type ritual, the precise form of death that the slave-girl suffers is completely unnecessary. (110)
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