Everyday Rituals
This week you learned about magic, religion, and ritual in archaeology. You learned that is possible to deduce ritualistic behavior from 25,000 years ago. Though rituals have been considered to center around a religious rite, it is true that ritual is also associated with non-religious practitioners. For example, some believe that Yoga is a form of ritual. Consider what rituals you perform everyday that would likely leave artifacts in the archaeological record. Discuss would what artifacts/evidence would be necessary to correctly interpret the ritual.
For example, like billions of people, every morning the first thing I do is make coffee. I have a Nespresso machine (love!), I also have a lot of coffee cups. I recycle the coffee pods, but say a few are found a thousand years from now. The real evidence of my ritual will not be the Nespresso machine, nor the pods the evidence will be the coffee cups and the microscopic coffee residue in them.
Ritual
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course code and Title
Instructor’s Name
Date of Submission
Countless everyday rituals could leave behind evidence in the archaeological record. For example, many people practice yoga or meditation daily. If proof of these practices were to be found in the future, archaeologists might discover yoga mats, meditation cushions, or even instructional books or DVDs.
One ritual that I perform every day is brushing my teeth. This would likely leave several artifacts in the archaeological record, including the toothbrush, toothpaste tubes, and the container I keep my toothbrush in. To correctly interpret this ritual, archaeologists would need to understand the function of the toothbrush and toothpaste to understand that they were used for oral hygiene. Additionally, the presen...