Ritual, Hierarchy, and Change in Foraging Societies

Abstract

While there is widespread belief that ritual has a role to play in the emergence of cultural complexity in foraging societies, there has been virtually no sustained attempt to demonstrate its place in this process of cultural change. In part, this is due to the paucity of reliably identified "ritual" features, artifacts, and structures recovered from the archaeological record. A more important problem, however, is that most theoretical thinking by archaeologists on ritual has disconnected it from its broader social context. Ritual can act as an agent of both stability and change, and can be used to justify both the existence and extension of hierarchies and inequalities in so-called "egalitarian" societies. In this paper, the role of ritual as agent of change is explored using dual inheritance theory, and the implications of the model are discussed.