I love to read archaeology magazines because they report on a vast range of human beliefs and behaviors, keeping in mind that . Science fiction, which I loved growing up, is limited by the imagination of the writers; but for those who dig the dusty ground, the limits have more to do with interpreting the evidence in a rigorous, yet open-minded way.
So here’s a new one for me, from the article, “A Tale of Two Cities“, American Archaeology (fall 2016, p. 33, and partially available online). The article concerns discoveries made in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, at a location known as Cerro de la Virgen. Any mistakes below are most likely mine, as I manually transcribed these two paragraphs:
[Arthur] Joyce [of the University of Colorado-Boulder] and [Sarah] Barber [of the University of Central Florida] believe these [buried offering vessels] are examples of ritual caching to give the buildings a soul as well as to “feed” them through their years of use. One of Barber’s very first Rio Verde Valley excavation finds suggested this kind of ritual feeding: in Yugüe, she uncovered a cooking jar which had been filled with mussels and broken pottery, placed in a pit with dirt piled up to the jar’s neck, and then set on fire.
“Who were they feeding?” she says. “They were clearly leaving these things as offerings and not feeding themselves. The only interpretation is that this is food being left for the place. That matches with the literature saying that buildings and temples have souls and needs, and that you feed them to building a relationship.”
With regard to her reference to literature, the article notes that, post-Conquest, natives explained that buildings had souls, and this was recorded by the Spaniards.
The idea that humans can instill a soul into a building is fascinating. In this particular case, the ritual is to bury your dead in the floor of the building you wish to “ensoul.” So I wonder: Are they creating the soul themselves? Or is this a soul that happens to be floating by? The answer would certainly fill in the culture psychology, I should think, not to mention their cosmological beliefs.
