![]() This book examines the exchange of populations and the agricultural settlement in Greek Macedonia of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor and the Pontus, Eastern Thrace, the Caucasus, and Bulgaria during the inter-war period. The arrival in Greece of over 1.2 million refugees and their settlement proved to be a watershed with far-reaching consequences for the country. įollowing the defeat of the Greek Army in 1922 by nationalist Turkish forces, the Convention of Lausanne in 1923 specified the first compulsory exchange of populations ratified by an international organization. We discuss the implications of our findings on two models of ritual evolution, the Female Cosmetic Coalitions Hypothesis and the Ecological Stress Hypothesis, as well as a model about the emergence of complex cultural capacities, the Eight-Grade Model for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities. Such ritual behavior may have facilitated the demographic expansion of early modern humans, first within and eventually beyond the African continent. We argue that this pattern is a likely material manifestation of intensifying ritual activity in early populations of Homo sapiens. We determine that ochre use established itself as a habitual cultural practice in southern, eastern and northern Africa starting about 160,000 years ago, when a third of archaeological sites contain ochre. While the geographical distribution expanded with time, the absolute number of ochre finds grew significantly as well, underlining the intensification of ochre use. More importantly, the ratio of sites with ochre compared to those with only stone artifacts also followed this trend, indicating the increasing intensity of ochre use during the Middle Stone Age. The number of sites with ochre increased with each subsequent phase. Using methods based on time averaging, we identified three distinct phases of ochre use: the initial phase occurred from 500,000 to 330,000 the emergent phase from 330,000 to 160,000 and the habitual phase from 160,000 to 40,000 years ago. We report the most comprehensive meta-analysis of ochre use to date, spanning Africa between 500 and 40 thousand years ago, to examine data from more than a hundred archaeological sites. Here we take a continent-wide approach, rather than focusing on specific sites, regions or technocomplexes. Given the importance of ochre for the scholarly debate about the emergence of ‘behavioral modernity’, the lack of long-term spatio-temporal analyses spanning large geographical areas represents a significant gap in knowledge. Over the last two decades, red ochre has played a pivotal role in discussions about the cognitive and cultural evolution of early modern humans during the African Middle Stone Age. A study of participation, experience and meaning, The Burning Saints presents a highly original analysis of how mental processes can shape social and religious behaviour. As a cognitive ethnography, the book aims to identify the social, psychological and neurobiological factors that may be involved and to explore the role of emotional and physiological arousal in the performance of such ritual. The Burning Saints presents an analysis of these rituals and the psychology behind them.īased on long-term fieldwork, The Burning Saints traces the historical development and sociocultural context of the Greek fire-walking rituals. Carrying the sacred icons of the saints, participants dance over hot coals as the saint moves them. The festivals involve processions, music, dancing and animal sacrifices, and culminate in an electrifying fire-walking ritual. The Anastenaria are Orthodox Christians in Northern Greece who observe a unique annual ritual cycle focused on two festivals, dedicated to Saint Constantine and Saint Helen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |