Is there a paper or academic book chapter dealing with the tendency for archeological artifacts of unknown purposes to be labelled as of ritualistic or religious use ?

by linschn

Hi,

I know that it is a common joke for archeologists that "If you don't know what it's for, it's ritualistic".

I also know that the label "ritualistic" actually encompasses quite a lot of our daily routine and activities (shaving in the morning, wearing a tie at a funeral, etc.)

Therefore the joke can turn into a more serious discussion. It is not wrong to call almost everything ritualistic, it's just that it's a useless word unless you can describe the culture and actual usage pattern and symbolic meaning behind the ritual.

I'm making this point in an academic work in an unrelated field (computer science). I need to say that some characteristic of some software artifacts are only explainable if you know the culture in which their creators wrote the code, and that if you don't know this culture you are left with what is very much mindless ritualistic (and sometimes absurd) behavior.

My point would be stronger if I could draw a parallel to the archeology joke, and there was an academic paper that stated what I explained above.

I have found some nice explanations, and interesting discussions of this on this website and elsewhere on the web, but nothing that's serious or in-depth enough to be a good academic reference:

Also, there are efforts to make explicit the disappearing culture in which some of the most important software artifacts ever were created, such as e.g. The Unix Heritage Society, before every involved party dies and the bits rot and disappear in the digital Dark Age we are in. But they do not address why they do it in depth, and how much it matters for training the new generation of computer scientists and software engineers.

Thanks in advance.

It's not an academic paper, but what might fit the bill for you is Motel of the Mysteries by David MacAulay. It's essentially a send-up of archaeology, set in a future 2,000 years from now where archaeologists discover a religious site of the Usa culture (yep, the USA). The text and images are full of allusions to famous excavations and archaeologically-adjacent events such as Sophia Schliemann wearing the so-called Jewels of Helen from Troy, and Howard Carter peering into Tutankhamun's tomb, and the main thrust of the book is that everything these fictional excavators find is labeled ritual - though they're digging up the most mundane site imaginable in 20th c. America (I won't ruin it). It's certainly not a peer-reviewed article or anything of the sort, but I wouldn't hesitate to cite it in a research paper if this was the angle I was going for.