The Price is Rite

 

This week's  Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 is Ritual, by Dimitris Xygalatas, with the helpful subtitle "How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living"

On Monday it described this:

This is not a transcript of the broadcast. My legendary typing skills of up to 10 wpm aren't up to that. It's taken from the book iself.

The 'flamboyant pink' gives a clue to  what is being described: flamingoes. But it's not just birds that participate in these strange and apparently unproductive rituals. Many animals – especially homo sapiens – do it too, as evidenced by this find:

It goes on to discuss the transition from a nomadic life to a settled life based on agriculture

<autobiographical-note>

This reminded me of a talk I heard a few years ago about  Neanderthals, in a Cambridge Alumni Festival. The speaker argued that they weren't the clumsy Untermenschen depicted, depreciated, and  generally underestimated in popular culture, but rather they were sensitive souls. Some of the evidence for this was the so-called "flower burial" discovered at a cave in Shanidar, in Kurdistan. The theory, based on 'clumps' {HD sic   – odd word] of pollen found near the skeletons, was that some kind of funerary rite involved the ritual placing of flowers near the carefully preserved bodies of the departed.

But this theory was disproved  by recent findings reported in a Guardian article last summer;

“Although the evidence was subsequently questioned, the story was spectacular enough that it is still found in most archaeology textbooks,” said Prof Chris Hunt at Liverpool John Moores University, who also credits it with inspiring him to pursue a career in environmental archaeology.

However, recent excavations next to where Solecki [HD – original proponent of the "flower burial" theory] discovered the Shanidar 4 remains are [sic] prompting a rethink of this hypothesis. 

The collections of pollen were indeed collections: Some bee-like insect (bees. perhaps?) had gathered pollen from a range of flowers that bloomed at different times of the year:

The team ... revisited the original pollen identifications, finding that the clumps contained pollen from more than one type of flower, with not all of these plants blooming at the same time of year, – [sic] throwing the idea of funeral flowers into doubt. Rather, the most likely source of the pollen clumps is nesting bees – evidence of which was discovered nearby, – [ahem] the team suggests.

<anachronism-alert>
(might there have been a Neanderthal Interflora, forcing unseasonal flowers especially for the funeral market? [Probably not.])
</anachronism-alert>

...The [HD – newly discovered] bodies appear to have been placed in a gully-like feature, through which water occasionally flowed, immediately adjacent to a huge rock. The relative depths of the bodies suggest that they were placed here at different times – possibly over a period of several tens to hundreds of years.

Shanidar 4 and Z [HD – don't ask me why  they switched naming conventions for the bodies] appear to have been placed in roughly the same position, as if they were looking out of the cave, and while the remains of the third Neanderthal are too sparse to be sure of its burial position its head similarly appears to be facing east.

“What is becoming very clear is that at least three times Neanderthals came and camped on the sediments beside this gully, and placed a body into it,” Hunt said.

“Although it is very difficult to infer traditions from archaeology, this looks like a tradition of disposing of the dead in a very similar way and it’s obviously with care, because two of the bodies are very complete.”

 </autobiographical-note>

Today (Tuesday) the book considered the function of ritual, and suggested it was a coping mechanism, more common in stressful and or demanding situations – competitions, contests of any kind, wars... (it hadn't occurred to me [why would it?] that people entering a bomb shelter might be  found to favour one foot when; crossing the threshold; the right, I think the book said).

That's enough for today, but it's a fascinating book.

b