Amenhotep III, successor to Thutmose IV as pharaoh of Egypt during the fourteenth century BC, boasted of killing 96 head of wild cattle in a single expedition and 102 lions during the first decade of his reign. This was not simply hunting as sport, but a highly ritualized process fundamental to the symbolism of his prowess, the land's fecundity, and ultimately the stability of the world—a fascinating example among many from the prehistoric and ancient world of the centrality of ritual to animal and human behavior. A product of a John Templeton Foundation–funded project, this volume derives from a workshop—Becoming Human: The Emergence of Meaning—held at the University of Cambridge reflecting the editors’ long-standing interests in cognitive archaeology. The book elucidates how ritual activities and play behaviors have deep-rooted biological foundations in animals and humans alike, and how these have an important role in cognitive development and social cohesion.
Twenty contributors span animal behavior, human developmental psychology, and cognitive evolution, with the bulk reflecting examples from Old World and New World archaeology from the earliest Neolithic to the Classical period. Colin Renfrew defines the major concepts, reconsidered later by Evangelos Kyriakis, Lambros Malafouris, and Iain Morley. Play, whether real or imaginary, is an often free-form and informal entrée to social life—an expressive and exploratory way of learning the world. Ritual is formal, rule bound, usually aimed at an audience and often solemn, serving to coordinate, unify, and assuage anxieties. Both are performed, although ritual is usually functional, whereas play need not be. Restricted themes, repetition, and redundancy are characteristic of animal and human ritual, as noted in an excellent stage-setting chapter by Gordon Burghardt, and features that emerged in human ritual are clearly prefigured in animal (and child) play.
Play is ubiquitous among mammals, closely linked to creativity and problem-solving (Patrick Bateson). It is common in young animals, providing crucial scaffolding for social norms (Burghardt). Pretend play is infrequent and simple in great apes but universal in human children, suggesting that the motivation for pretend play evolved during human evolution, whatever its specific functionality or benefits were (Peter Smith). Much of it occurs in late infancy and early childhood, and the absence of these ontological stages in apes and humans prior to Homo erectus reveals that it became important only with the serious rise of brain size, which is characteristic of later archaic humans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens (Morley). This involved increasingly exaggerated and repetitive behaviors that served to reduce tension that evolved through repetition of nonquotidian concepts into human rituals (Ellen Dissanayak).
Games, ceremonies, and their public arenas fall somewhere in between play and ritual, serving as mechanisms for learning (Kyriakis) and as culturally assembled embodied processes of joint attention, shared action, and collective intentionality that need to be performed in order to be able to conceptualize them (Malafouris). Rituals are often rote or habitual (Burghardt), although little is made of individual behavioral rituals or the origins of music and dance as imitation of animal calls and behavior, despite a clear theme throughout the book of the centrality of animals to human play and ritual. The field is difficult: play is difficult to define in the animal world, and as Renfrew notes, play and ritual are notoriously difficult to distinguish archaeologically from quotidian objects (such as figurines and other paraphernalia of sacred play of the Maya).
As a Paleolithic specialist, I was disappointed by the chapters covering the earliest periods. The Upper Paleolithic could have provided rich material for analysis, but it appears only in a brief mention of the origins of “symbolism” by Dissanayake. The period/place specialist chapters are rich, however, detailing masked dancing of the Near Eastern seventh millennium BC onward (Yosef Garfinkel); controlled drama of feasting in the Maltese Neolithic temples (Caroline Malone); centrality of male initiation (transformation) in the divinely sanctioned play and ritual sports of Egypt, Minoan Crete, and the wider Near Eastern Bronze Age (Lyvia Morgan, Nanno Marinatos); Maya sacred play that is anything but playful (David Freidel and Michelle Rich); transformation in Puebloan play (Claire Halley); symbolism of Mesoamerican ritual blood sports and their associations with rain, blood, and agricultural fertility (Karl Taube); animal mimesis in early imperial Chinese performance (Roel Sterckz); and the agonistic Greek “epic” games, which were in many respects a formalized civilian rehearsal of the Trojan war (Nigel Spivey).
I reserve particular praise for Trevor Watkins's analysis of Early Neolithic ritual in Southwest Asia. This came as a step-change from anything earlier, a new form of cultural niche construction vital to the maintenance of growing group sizes. Watkins hypothesizes that superhuman agents became central for the first time in a prosocial religion based on making, maintaining, and destroying costly material culture such as the circles and monoliths of Göbekli Tepe and elsewhere. It is a monumental contribution in several respects.
The book concludes with summary reflections by Malafouris, Morley, and Robin Osborne, which reiterate the observance that play and ritual are mammalian universals closely linked to performance (including mimesis), innovation, and creativity, and that they have been powerful forces in human cognitive and social evolution. Morley's “pentagram of performance” neatly summarizes the ways in which the expressive forms of play and ritual—drama, narrative, music, dance, social learning, and mimesis—are fundamentally related to underlying cognitive capacities. This is all well and good, and it certainly convinced me that we should take play as seriously as ritual. But how to test these hypotheses? Although the specific archaeological contributions are of uniformly high quality, the lack of contributions by cognitive scientists to overarching interpretations is a weakness—as is the relatively casual coverage of human evolution, which I expected to be stronger given the book's title. Perhaps Freud is unfashionable in social science nowadays, but I was surprised to see a complete lack of acknowledgement of Freud's notions that neuroses are individual religions and that religions are collective neuroses (in Totem and Taboo, 1913). Understanding how rituals often begin with individual repetitive eccentricities would have provided a useful bridge between the animal and human worlds.
Despite these minor criticisms, this book is an informative read, and it certainly advances an understanding of the expression of play and ritual in early societies, if not specific methodologies for elucidating its evolution scientifically. In this way, it joins other Templeton Foundation–funded projects, which forward logical interpretations but leave us with a number of untested hypotheses.
