Cults

The term cult stems from the Latin cultus, to worship. The term is difficult to define, as it is used to denote various actions and situations. In common parlance, cult brings to mind specific groups or sects who hold unorthodox religious beliefs. In anthropology and archaeology, the termcult tends to be conflated with ritual and religion. A study entitled “an archaeology of cult” will invariably discuss religion and ritual, while an anthropological study by the same title is likely to focus on religious and magical rituals.

Colin Renfrew defines the archaeology of cult as the system of patterned actions in response to religious beliefs, noting that these actions are not always clearly separated from other actions of everyday life. Indicators that may point to cult and ritual archaeologically are attention-focusing devices, a boundary zone between this world and the next, the presence of a deity, and evidence of participation and offering.

Thus, Renfrew notes that ritual locations will be places with special and/or natural associations (for example, caves, groves, and mountaintops) or in special buildings set apart for sacred functions (temples). The structure and equipment used will have attention-focusing devices (altars, special benches, hearths, lamps, gongs, vessels, and the like), and the sacred zone is likely to contain many repeated symbols (i.e., redundancy). In terms of boundaries, while rituals may involve public displays, they may also have a hidden aspect. Ruth Whitehouse focuses on this hidden dimension of ritual in her study of Neolithic caves in Italy. The sacred area may often show strong signs of cleanliness and pollutions (pools and basins).

The deity may be reflected in the use of cult images or represented in an abstract manner. Ritual symbols will often relate to the deity and associated myths. These may include animal and abstract symbolism. Rituals generally involve prayer and special gestures. These are rarely attested archaeologically, except in iconography, and it is anthropology that provides information on dances, music, the use of drugs, and so on.

Other rituals may involve the sacrifice of animals and humans, the consumption of food and drinks, and votive offerings. All of these have been attested to both archaeologically and anthropologically. The equipment and offerings may reflect a great investment of wealth and resources, although this is not always the case.

To assist in elucidating the problems involved in such analyses, which range from attribution in cultures without direct ethnographic parallels to being self-referential, archaeologists have traditionally turned to anthropology. Here, studies of cult focus on religious and magical rituals, in particular shamanism and specific aspects of rituals (termed a cult, for example, a fertility cult). Following Émile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade, such studies focus on the sacred (as opposed to the profane). The sacred is set apart from the normal world and may entail knowledge that is forbidden to everyone but the cult leaders. This knowledge is generally associated with [Page 624]magical forces, spirits and deities, and the distinction is often blurred.

While it is no longer fashionable to classify belief systems, there are a few important key concepts. Animism is the belief in spirits inhabiting mountains, trees, rivers, and so on. Next is totemism, a complex concept that broadly means the symbolic representation of social phenomena by natural phenomena. There are various kinds of totem, for example, individual totems, clan totems, and sacred-site totems. Their significance varies cross-culturally, and some anthropologists (for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss) maintain that there is no such thing as totemism because it is not a single phenomenon. Yet one of the most debated topics in both archaeology and anthropology remains studies of shamanism. Briefly, a shaman is a type of religious expert who mediates between the human and spirit world. In archaeology, there has been plenty of work on shamanistic practices with relation to rock art, for example, the work of David Lewis-Williams and Anne Solomon in South Africa.

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