Agriculture and the Apocalypse
By my reading of history, the turning (or tipping) point for humanity was the domestication of plants and animals, otherwise known as the Neolithic Revolution. Before this occurred — at different...
View ArticleSanctifying Social Inequality at Chaco Canyon
The story is familiar and follows a similar trajectory wherever people have made the transition from foraging to agriculture: surpluses enable social stratification that is legitimized as part of the...
View ArticleInterview with Professor Craig Martin
Craig Martin is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College. He has published several articles (links below) and a recent book, Masking Hegemony: A Genealogy of...
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Early Complex Societies & Early Organized Religions
Historians have long known that the shelf life of complex societies throughout human history has been rather limited. Archaeologists are aware of this also. But how to explain it? In a recent (open...
View ArticleHindu Caste & Capitalism
Are capitalism and Christianity compatible? This is the bizarre question asked by Mario Gómez-Zimmerman in “The Capitalist Structures of Hinduism.” His belief is that this compatibility (which seems...
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Community & Kinship at Catalhoyuk
Strange things are afoot at Catalhoyuk (7400-5600 BCE), one of the earliest and most important Neolithic (i.e., sedentary and agricultural) sites known to archaeology. As I noted in Bones, Burials and...
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Chinese Religion: Worship Thy Parents
There are many ways in which China remains a cipher for Westerners, most of whom labor under the misapprehension that “modern civilization” originated in ancient Greece and spread slowly outward,...
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