Most of the time, all we have is the traces of what they made to go by, and that only gets you so far. Imagine some future archaeologist got a hold of some of the artifacts from our civilization. These kinds of remains are always fragmentary; like fossilization, the preservation of human-made objects is largely a matter of chance, and the vast majority of them don't survive. So... suppose a future archaeologist found a bent, rusted hand-cranked can opener.
What would (s)he make of that?
Unless there was the fortuitous survival of a can of beans nearby, they might never figure out what it was used for.
So it would very likely be placed in a museum with a card saying "Probably used in rituals."
I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on the archaeologists, here. To their credit, they are unhesitating in saying "we're not sure" -- something every good scientist should be willing to do. We humans are just endlessly curious, and we want solutions to mysteries. Leaving the question open might be the most honest thing for a skeptic to do, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying.
Especially when we have lots of evidence. Like, for example, the strange case of the "Burned House Horizon" -- the layers of accumulated archaeological evidence (horizons) in a large part of eastern Europe showing evidence of entire settlements being repeatedly burned to the ground.
For over two and a half millennia.
The earliest evidence we have of the practice is from the the Starčevo–Körös–Criş Culture, which spanned from what is now Serbia all the way to eastern Bulgaria, and dates to around 5,900 B.C.E. The latest is from the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, which is found from Romania to western Ukraine, in 3,200 B.C.E. How the behavior spread is uncertain -- whether one culture learned it from the other, or one culture descended from the other, is unknown. Unfortunately, it's usually impossible to differentiate between cultural (learned) transmission and genetic transmission, barring (even more) fortuitous survival of adequate human remains from which to extract DNA.
So we don't know how it spread, or why. Some anthropologists believe that it didn't spread as a behavior; there are a few who claim the Burned House Horizon is simply preserving a record of accidental house fires, tribal violence, or both.
A lot of others disagree, however. Mirjana Stevanović of the University of California - Berkeley, writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, makes a persuasive argument that a simple house fire of a wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof structure -- whether accidental or deliberately set -- wouldn't cause temperatures sufficient to produce the kind of vitrification of clay that is seen all through the Burned House Horizon. In fact, Stevanović, along with archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter, actually built a house using the techniques known to have been utilized by cultures in Neolithic eastern Europe, then burned it down:
[Image credit: Stevanović et al., 1997]
They found the only way they could get the clay to vitrify was to pile up enormous amounts of brush, straw, and other burnables against the foundation of the house.
In other words, the houses seem to have been burned deliberately, and regularly, by their owners. But why?
Hypotheses vary from the practical to the bizarre. Some suggest that it was a way of destroying the habitats of disease-carrying pests during the regular epidemics our forebears were prey to. Others think that because wattle-and-daub structures eventually become dilapidated, it was a way of getting rid of them so their owners could rebuild -- using the convenient fired clay bricks produced by the burning. Some have even suggested that it was a religious ritual they've called domicide -- the symbolic killing of the houses in an entire settlement, followed by another cycle of "birth." (The adherents of this model point out that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, the one we know the most about, the complete burning of houses in a settlement happened on average every 75-80 years -- back then, pretty much the upper bound of a human lifespan. Coincidence?)
The thing is, though, all we have is the evidence, which amounts to 2,500 years' worth of burned rubble, distributed over a (very) wide geographical region. The reason why this happened could be any of the above, or a combination, or one thing during one period and something else during another, or an entirely different reason we haven't yet dreamed up. It's a puzzle.
But then, so is much of our history. If you're interested in the past, you have to get used to that. Even during periods when there were written records, the sad fact is that a great many of those documents didn't survive to the present, and whatever was contained within them is gone forever. But in non-literate cultures, we have even less -- just broken remnants of what they did.
Why they did these things, and in fact who those people were, will always remain in the realm of informed speculation.
So that's this morning's rather unsatisfying conclusion. Burned houses, ancient cultures, and the persistence of mystery. It's the way of things in science, though, isn't it? As Richard Feynman put it, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."
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