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Exploring the Roots of Religion - Professor John R. 2009
Exploring the Roots of Religion
Scope:
The most important record of religious history resides not in books and sacred texts but buried in the earth. Ancient graves, statues, temples, standing stones, sacrificial offerings, and places of initiation all bear witness to the universal human quest for spiritual power and understanding. Since the beginnings of scientific archaeology in the 18th century, excavators have been discovering and interpreting evidence ranging from tiny goddess figurines carved from mammoth ivory to entire sacred landscapes, such as at the Giza plateau in Egypt. The millennia of human experience that preceded the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago is only accessible to us through archaeology. And even for more recent religions and cults, the “testimony of the spade” providesan essential perspective that enhances our understanding of the literary tradition.
Archaeology provides evidence that is very different in nature from historical writings. With aerial reconnaissance and remote sensing technology, archaeologists relocate lost temples and othercult sites. With trowels and brushes, they gently remove the dust of ages from buried sites andartifacts. And with space-age laboratory techniques, they analyze the residues left by royal funeral feasts as well as the last meals of sacrificial victims.
Some 30,000 years before scribes made the firstreligious writings, Ice Age peoples of Europe and the Near East were creating shrines in caves,modeling images of divinities and shamans, and using art and music in ceremonies. Evenearlier, in the time of the Neanderthals, some of the tribe’s deceased were laid in their graveswith flowers, possibly symbolizing resurrection after death. The first theme of our course, “In the Beginning,” explores these earliest religious rites and the beliefs that inspired them, right down to the time of the first farmers and the construction of the first megalithic monuments.
Next we devote six of our lectures to the ritual activity that seems to lie at the very core of religion worldwide—namely, burial of the dead, under the theme “Quest for the Afterlife.” Beginning with the simple pit tombs of ordinary villagers in predynastic Egypt, whose bodies were naturally mummified in the dry sand of the Sahara, we move forward in time to the extraordinary graves of wealthy monarchs like the Viking queen Åsa, whose elaborate, treasure-filled tomb shows that at east some of our ancestors believed that you can take it with you. We also examine ambitious funeral architecture from Petra in Jordan to Easter Island in the Pacific and include a visit to the enigmatic burial mounds of prehistoric North America.
Another universal element in religion is ritual: the performance of traditional actions that range from dances to foretelling the future. Although such activities may seem ephemeral, they often leave clear traces in the archaeological record. Our third theme, “Reconstructing Ancient Rituals,” starts with a survey of the fertility cults of warriors and farmers in Bronze Age Scandinavia. Then we move on to Minoan bull dancing, Chinese and Greek divination, and Mayan ball games and human sacrifices. We conclude by examining a tour de force of scientific archaeology that has reconstructed, hour by hour, the last day in the life of a Celtic prince, possibly a Druid, who was sacrificed and buried in a bog at the time of the Roman conquest
of Britain.
This grisly ritual leads us into our fourth theme, “Lost Gods and Fallen Temples,” where human sacrifice becomes almost routine as part of the nearly superhuman efforts to glorify divine monarchs through monumental architecture, impressive ceremony, and above all spectacular funeral rites. The kings and queens of Ur in Mesopotamia (hometown of the biblical Abraham), the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of China and Rome, and the royalty of the ancient Americas have all left indelible marks of their status as gods, rather than as mere mortals.
The penultimate theme of the course, “Sacred Landscapes,” offers a tour of some of earth’s most famous ancient sites: Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, and others. These great achievements of ancient engineers in fact functioned as ceremonial centers, and it is our mission to understand the full range of remains at each site and to reconstruct the religious beliefs and worldviews that impelled ancient peoples in every corner of the globe to invest such vast expenditures of time, wealth, human power, and technical ingenuity to create stages for their religious rites and earthly images of the sacred cosmos. We also explore lesser-known ceremonial centers such as Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest and the Ajanta Caves of India.
In our final group of six lectures, under the theme “Communities of the Spirit,” we consider anumber of extinct religions in their totality. The best known of these is unquestionably the early monotheistic cult of the heretic Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who closed the temples of Ra and the other traditional gods and tried to impose the worship of a single god, Aten, throughout his kingdom. Similar grandeur attends the discoveries of the center for Aztec religious life at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City (formerly the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán), where recent excavations have brought to light a series of pyramids, offerings, and artworks that span the entire period of Aztec domination in Mesoamerica. The search for the ancient Persian cult of Mithras takes us deep underground to the buried chapels of his worshippers throughout the Roman Empire, while the city of Jenne-jeno in Africa yields evidence of a cult in which craftworkers, specifically ironsmiths, were regarded as diviners and religious leaders. Finally, viewing earth from space, we close with the mystery of the Nazca Desert in Peru, where gigantic images of animals and other designs laid out over great distances still defy the efforts of archaeologists to unlock their secrets.
Although this course focuses primarily on religions that belong to the ancient world, we will often pause to consider how archaeological finds shed unexpected light on the origins and rituals of such modern religions as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Even today, most people’s religious experience is shaped not by theological creeds but by enduring traditions rooted in the remote past.
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Lecture One - The Roots of Religious Experience
Scope:
Archaeology is the science of studying the past through its material remains. Religions may seem to center around theology, abstract beliefs, and codes of behavior, but the spiritual will inevitably be reflected in the physical world. The ways in which a people bury their dead, represent supernatural powers, ensure divine favor through offerings, and construct spaces for worship provide essential clues to their religious beliefs. To understand humanity, we must understand religion. Religious monuments often form the dominant element of a culture’s remains.
Archaeology provides the only surviving data about beliefs and rituals that developed during the ages preceding the invention of writing. Even for the historical period, excavations shed new light on aspects of religion that could never be known from written records. In this course we visit some of the most important sites around the globe in an exploration of the origins and development of religion.
Outline
I. This course will explore the roots of modern world religions but will also study some of the earliest religious expressions of faiths long dead, which we can only learn about through their archaeological remains.
II. Let’s start by explaining what archaeologists do and how our work differs from that of other historians. A. Archaeology is the science of studying the human past through its material remains: artifacts, buildings, sites, human remains, botanical and zoological remains, and alterations to the natural landscape.
B. Archaeologists collaborate with researchers in many fields to gain an interdisciplinary perspective on past cultures and civilizations, from the pollen in the air they breathed to the significance of the art they produced.
C. For the entire span of human existence before the invention of writing, archaeology provides our only evidence for human history and culture, including the development and spread of religions.
III. Let me introduce myself and tell you about my archaeological training and the various experiences and discoveries that have made the study of ancient religions a major part of my career as a fieldworker and scholar.
A. I grew up at the Falls of the Ohio River in New Albany, Indiana, on a hill where prehistoric hunters camped to watch for migrating bison herds preparing to ford the river. Ancient artifacts often turned up during construction projects or even just gardening in our neighborhood, and I became obsessed with the vestiges of the past worlds that lay hidden beneath our feet.
B. These early experiences grew into training at Yale and Cambridge and a career as an archaeologist. I have had opportunities to survey and explore prehistoric mounds in the Ohio River Valley; Celtic rituals in England; sacred rock art in Scandinavia; pagan and Christian religious structures at a Roman villa in Portugal; and oracle sites in Greece, Turkey, and Albania.
C. Reconstructing ancient religious rituals from their archaeological remains has become a central part of my life’s work. Some of the sites we visit during this course were chosen because of my desire to share with you my personal experience.
IV. What are our goals? I have three; you may have additional goals of your own.
A. First, we will approach our subject experientially, through visits to more than 30 important archaeological sites. Archaeology is visceral experience; I would like you to share in an encounter with the past that is as much physical as it is cerebral.
B. Second, you should expect to acquire a mass of knowledge about ancient religions and religious sites—to become “literate” in the subject. Both modern archaeological research projects and the mass of evidence from the sites themselves will be given due attention.
C. Finally, I hope you will come to the end of the course with a new view of religion and its role in human history: how it evolved, what its universal elements are, what aspects unify various religions throughout the world, and what aspects divide them—sometimes violently. It will be our mission to understand the spiritual force that drove people
to these heroic achievements. *1
Questions to Consider:
1. Would you expect the material remains of religion (sacred objects, places of worship, burials, and so on) to reflect the religious beliefs of its adherents directly?
2. Among contemporary religions, can you think of an example where material remains might seriously confuse archaeologists of the future? *2
*01 文字が開発される以前の神的ものに対する私達の態度をみることができる。
*02 答えは至って簡単。1はおそらく、そうであるものとそうでないものの2通りであるか、あるいは、全称的に肯定するか、否定するかの最大で4つの通りしか考えることしかできなく、それを決定的にすることはおそらくできぬというもの。2については、おそらく、宗教的意味合いが薄れて実用的なものとなったものだろう。
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Lecture Two - Neanderthal Burials at Shanidar
Scope:
When Ralph Solecki of Columbia University and his wife Rose began to excavate at Shanidar Cave in 1951, the scholarly image of Neanderthals conformed to a caveman stereotype of brutish behavior and subhuman mental capacity. In levels that dated back to the Middle Paleolithic (more than 35,000 years ago), however, the Soleckis discovered that the Neanderthals had deliberately buried their dead in pits, curling the body into a fetal position and sometimes placing a stone slab over the grave. This revolutionary discovery remains the earliest incontrovertible religious site in the world. Much more controversial has been the Soleckis’ conclusion, based on pollen analysis, that Neanderthals placed their dead on soft beds of pine branches and filled the tombs with flowers. Evidence for Neanderthal cave shrines, skull cults, and worship of animal deities also remains hotly disputed.
Outline:
I. First, let’s look at the roadmap for the course so you understand where these lectures are going and how they fit together.
A. The course is divided into six groups of six lectures each.
B. The first set is called “In the Beginning.” It includes the introduction and the exploration of a series of sites that carry us back into the Stone Age.
C. In this set of lectures, we will discuss what kind of religious impulses come to us out of the period known as the Paleolithic.
II. Neanderthals were both very much like us and different from us.
A. We know about Neanderthals because of a series of discoveries of complete Neanderthal skeletons.
B. Neanderthals would have been shorter than we are, but their brains would have been the same size as ours, though arranged differently. *3
C. We know Neanderthals were much stronger than we are from the density of their bones, the mass of their long bones, and the large attachments for their muscles.
D. They also were extremely agile and swift on rough terrain, based on the massive strength that their skeletons reveal.
III. The shambling, dull-witted Neanderthal stereotype was promoted in the early 20th century.
A. Neanderthals were discovered in 1848 by British soldiers, working in the caves of Gibraltar.
B. In the 1850s, workers in the Neander Valley of Germany uncovered an old rock shelter where they found some unusual-looking humanoid bones.
C. In the early 1900s, an archaeologist working at a rock shelter in France found a skeleton of a Neanderthal on a bed of flint flakes with a hand resting near a beautiful axe.
1. The skeleton was arranged in the form of what is called a flexed burial, which looks like the fetal position.
2. The Neanderthals may have felt that this position was appropriate to someone going back into the womb of the earth. *4
3. The discovery caused a sensation because up until the early 20th century, no one believed such human forebears had religion.
D. Even as these discoveries were being made, Marcellin Boule took a very complete adult male Neanderthal skeleton from a rock shelter in the Dordogne Valley and clothed it in flesh, skin, and animal skins, creating the stereotype of the caveman.
IV. Decades later, along came a husband and wife team, Ralph and Rose Solecki.
A. In the 1950s, prehistorians were beginning to bring analytical techniques and scientific methods of the hard sciences to their study of early humans. Ralph was one of those pioneering archaeologists.
B. Between 1951 and 1960, the Soleckis carried out a number of field seasons in Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq. They discovered not only the remains of thousands of tools but the skeletons of nine Neanderthal individuals.
C. Ralph found the Shanidar 1 burial and worked out a very interesting scenario for the burial.
1. He was amazed when the bones were studied later and it turned out that this individual had many congenital disabilities.
2. From the obvious care taken with his burial, Ralph concluded that these were people of compassion. *5
D. In the Shanidar 4 burial, a palynologist found pockets of pollen that belonged to seven different early-summer-flowering plants that may have been bouquets woven into garlands around pine branches for the tomb.
E. Based on findings from Shanidar 4, Solecki felt that everything he had thought about Neanderthals had been turned on its head.
1. They were people who buried their dead not only with honor but with flowers, symbols of resurrection.
2. Interestingly, a number of those plants are medicinal.
V. Shanidar entered the world of popular culture in Jean Auel’s novel Clan of the Cave Bear.
A. The novel shows a group of people very different from us physically, somewhat different from us culturally, and yet united to us and maybe even anterior to us, preceding us in the area of religious ritual, religious belief, and symbolic religious behavior.
B. A part of the “cultural DNA” of the Shanidar burials has been handed down to us: a belief in something that transcends this earthly existence. *6
Questions to Consider:
1. What were your preconceptions about Neanderthals or prehistoric humans in general?
2. Would you agree that religious ideas about death and the afterlife form a logical “first step” in the development of religion? *7
*03 これは、脳というものについて考える時に大きな参考になると思う。
*04 これが、神秘性の起源なのだろうか。もっとも、一つの構造という答えに対して、なんら価値のない予想だけれども。その証拠立てになることはできるのかもしれない。というのは、それに対しての先天的な説明になることができるであろうから。しかし、依然としてア・プリオリに対しての「根源的な」解決にはなってはいない。
*05 これはいささか早急な、判断かもしれない。というのは、哀れみというよりは、単に有利であるからという理由に基づくことも可能ではあるから。もっとも、その埋葬方法についてはやはり、その意味についていろいろ推測することはできる。
*06 そう、結局はSomethingに帰結するのだろうか。
*07 これが、初期の宗教に対する始まりであるかどうかは不明だけれども、それと何かしらの関連はあるのかもしれない。
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Lecture Three - Hunting Magic in Sacred Caves
Scope:
In 1940, a dog named Robot disappeared into a rocky cleft in south-central France, leading four young boys to the discovery of a lifetime: a previously unknown cave that was filled with extraordinary paintings of animals and various symbols created by Ice Age hunters. Among the images in the heart of the cave was a human figure wearing a bird-like mask, standing near a wounded bison. Archaeological study of the paintings and the cave deposits showed that the art was 15,000 years old. This cave, called Lascaux, is only the most elaborate of a constellation of painted caves in France and northern Spain. These rank among the world’s oldest religious shrines, although prehistorians continue to debate the meaning of the art and the nature of the ceremonies held by torchlight in these deep caverns. Hunting magic and the spiritual initiation of young hunters may have been the purpose behind the art.
Outline:
I. The origins of the human religious impulse, which consists of desiring to bury our dead and to pay them honor and reverence even after they have passed away*8, will be one of the strands that binds this course together.
A. In this lecture, we’re going to look at two more strands and their origins in the Paleolithic: the idea of sacred space and the emergence of a god or deity.
B. Both of those quests for origins take us back to northern Spain and southwestern France.
C. We have moved forward thousands of years, and the Neanderthals have vanished. We are with our own modern human ancestors and the world they left behind in what we call the Upper Paleolithic.
II. In 1878, a Spanish nobleman named Sautuola went to see a Paris exposition that featured cave art.
A. He was very excited by the exhibits and decided to explore a cave on his own estate in a hill called Altamira. The cave had been discovered by a huntsman seeking his lost dog.
B. During the exploration, Sautuola’s daughter, Maria, found that the cave’s ceiling was covered with paintings of extinct bison.
C. We know now that those remarkable paintings are about 15,000–16,000 years old.
D. French prehistorians dismissed the discovery at first, and it was years before they came around.
III. In France in 1940, four boys were out rabbit hunting near a place called Lascaux. In a strange repeat of what had happened at Altamira, one boy’s dog disappeared.
A. When they followed the sound of the dog’s barking, they found something even more spectacular than Altamira.
B. The first impression that the Lascaux paintings made was that this place was all about hunting magic, or
sympathetic magic.
C. It seemed possible that these caves were chambers of initiation for rites of passage involving young hunters.
D. André Leroi-Gourhan, on the other hand, suggests that the symbolism in these paintings is about an opposition, or perhaps a conjunction, between male and female.*9
IV. In the years between the discovery of Altamira and that great exhibition in Paris in 1878, a new class of small art had begun to appear.
A. There was a group of figurines or statuettes called Venus figurines, revealing an element of femininity that was lacking from early discoveries.
B. In France, outside a cave at Laussel, a slab of stone was discovered on which there was a woman, a mother-goddess figure.
V. There is a lot of evidence about how cave art was created.
A. We found little lamps, sometimes filled with animal fat, used to light the work while it was going on.
B. A study of the pigments shows the few colors that were basic to this art form and the ingredients from which they were made.
C. Not only were the lines sometimes incised, but the color was sometimes blown on through a little blow gun.
D. We also know that these wonderful rituals could be accompanied by music.
E. Some paintings seem to have been placed in areas of the caves specifically for their resonance. *10
Questions to Consider:
1. Some scholars regard Paleolithic cave art as simply “art for art’s sake.” Does this seem reasonable to you?
2. Animals play a central role in cave art. What role do they play in the iconography of contemporary religions? *11
*08 これには、まだ多少の疑問が残る。というのは、神的なものを考えていたかは、どこまででも断言できぬし、さらに、それが他者への思いやりゆえの敬意というよりは、単に利己的な死への畏怖からそうしただけなのかもしれないのだから。もちろん、このように考えることも十分にできるということは注意したい。
*09 まさに、馬鹿げた議論の一つになる要素を秘めた類のもの。
*10 後期ハイデガーの聴覚に対する興味というのもこのようなものからなのだろうか。
「 認識のモデルとして視覚以外に、聴覚や触覚が考えられる。『存在と時間』の現象学は、『現象がそのうちで視られうる光』を見る。しかし後期ハイデガーは視覚モデルでなく、聴覚モデルに移行する。それは『言葉への道』であり、人間は言葉（大文字のロゴス）を聴き、その言葉に応じて語ることとして語る（終章第一節）（略）しかしともかくハイデガーの思惟の道を全体として語るならば、『光をみることからロゴス（言葉）を聴くことへ』と定式化できるだろう。（ハイデガー入門 細川亮一 ちくま新書 2001 p107）
認識に対する視覚の優位性は古来より説かれていたとどこかで、みたけれども、原始的には、それと同様に聴覚も非常に何かを認識する時に大切なものであったかもしれない。あるいは、認識というよりは、それが与える人間の影響が大きかった（今と比べての相対的意味合いで）といえるのかもしれない。
*11 1について。このようなことはどこまでも断言はできるような類のものではない。しかし、確かに、芸術というものは、ある程度の知能と豊かさが必要となることから、そうはいえないのかもしれない。つまり、やはりそこには宗教的意味合いがあったということ。そもそも、芸術と宗教とに関連は認められるものである。2について。それは、昔ながらの言い伝えを信じている人にとって、ある特定の生物は神聖であるだとか、食してはいけないだとかいうような役割だろう。
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Lecture Four - Myths of the Shaman
Scope:
Early European visitors to South Africa encountered paintings, some of them apparently of great antiquity, on rock faces in the Kalahari. Their discovery predated the first finds of painted Stone Age caves in Europe, and the art of the San peoples was consequently classed as decorative art or, more dismissively, “prehistoric wallpaper.” Anthropologists and archaeologists in recent decades have been able to demonstrate that the rock art is in fact religious. Specific images and scenes can be linked to the religious mythology of the San, and in some cases to specific rituals. As in the much older painted caves of France and Spain, San rock art often seems concerned with hunting magic. Animals, such as the eland, are prominent in San myths and also in San art; some large beasts are also depicted surrounded by humans in rainmaking ceremonies. *12
Outline:
I. This entire world of ideas, of actions, of things left behind, introduces us to the idea of cognitive archaeology, which tries to go beyond a mere record of what was left and a reconstruction of what the technology was that created it, all the way into the cognitive processes that led religious specialists to create. *13
II. We can see the first of these religious specialists in Lascaux Cave.
A. We call such a person a shaman, a term that came into scholarly thought and parlance from stories of Siberian tribes who had religious specialists.
B. In Lascaux, modern investigators found a scene involving a confrontation among several figures: a wounded bison being hunted, a human it seems to be charging, and a bird that mimics the shape of the man’s head.
C. One of the elements of shamanism involved dealing with animal spirits and sometimes assuming the spirit of an animal to pass into the spirit world. Perhaps the third figure represents such a shaman.
D. Confirmation that shamans dressed up as animals can be found in the French cave of Trois Frères, where two cave paintings show parts of animals worn by humans. *14
III. This introduces us to this world of the shaman.
A. Shamans were found wherever there were groups of people living together as bands or tribes who felt some sort kinship.
B. Tribal and band societies and our earliest ancestors typically did not specialize. The shaman was an exception.
C. The previous shaman trained the new shaman.
D. Often the most important religious things are shrouded by a veil of secrecy; so it was with shamanism.
E. In the 19th century, two Native American shamans felt they had come to the end of their tradition and told their stories. *15
IV. Shamans are found all over the world. However, we will focus on shamans of the Kalahari Desert.
A. Here groups lived by hunting and gathering well into the 20th century.
B. In The Hunters, John Marshall followed four hunters, including one shaman, around the Kalahari Desert. The shaman’s task was to be in touch with the spirits of the animals and to lead the hunters to those animals. *16
V. Our record for the shamanistic tradition in South Africa is rock art.
A. Brian Fagan uses this rock art as an example of putting shamanism into visible form.
B. The people of that area interviewed in the 19th and 20th centuries explained that their shamans had different functions, including rainmaking and hunting, linking them with the earliest times.
C. What do we see in some of these panels of rock art?
1. Like the Paleolithic caves in France and Spain, they often show us animals. *17
2. They sometimes show scenes between humans and animals that seem imagined rather than real—scenes of religious ritual.
D. Individual shamans are shown with peck marks and little dots all over their bodies. It has been suggested that these show us that boiling feeling inside when one is slipping into the trance.
E. Shamans in the Kalahari Desert used whirling, music, chanting, intense concentration, or breath control to slip into that place from which they could access the spirit world.
*12 詳細がないから、詳しくはわからないけれども、確かに単に他の目的がなく、ただそれだけのための目的であった。つまり、単なる芸術活動を試みていたということはありそうもないことであると思う。
*13 インドのカースト制を考える時、そして、何か宗教に携わるものに神聖な地位を与えるということを考える時、何か我々はそれに対して特別なものを抱くということは十分に考えることができるものである。しかし、依然としてやはりその理由というものは、推論の領域でしかないし、ここまでからの記述からでは理解できないと思う。
*14 動物の力を得ようとしていたのだろうか。とにかく、確かに、このようなものからは、現代の常識的な意味における認識とは異なる認識をしていたと考えられる。それは、意味において決定的に違うということ。
*15 これらのどの文でも、様々なことに対してその非常に大きな意味を語ることができるだろう。集団と個。そして、宗教者と俗人。伝統と現実など。
*16 世界のどのシャーマンも、役割は同じだったのだろうか。*17を考慮に入れるなら、このことは十分に考慮にいれるべきことであるだろう。
*17 ダーウィンがいうような進化論ということが、ここでもその正当性を確保されるということだろうか。
神の信仰-宗教。人間が本来的に、全能の神の存在についての高貴な信仰を付与されているという証拠はまったくない。それどころか、急ぎの足の旅行者ではなく未開人と長くいっしょに暮らした人たちが、唯一神あるいは多数の神についてなんの観念ももたず、そのような観念を表現する言葉ももたない人種が、過去にたくさんあったし現在もたくさんあるということについて、数多くの証言をしている。この問題はいうまでもなく、宇宙を創造し支配する者が存在するかどうかという、もっと高尚な問題とは、まったくちがったものである。そしてこの後者の問題は、過去において最高の知者である若干の人たちから、肯定的に答えられてきた。*18
だが、もしも<宗教>という語に、目に見えない、つまり心霊的なはたらきへの信仰ということを含めるならば事情は全くちがってくる。なぜなら、このような信仰は文明の低い人種では普遍的であるように思われるからである。*19 どうしてそのような信仰が生じたかということを理解するのも、難しいことではない。想像力、驚異心、好奇心といった重要な諸能力、それに加えて若干の推理の力*20が、部分的に発達してくると、人は当然、身のまわりでおこっていることを理解しようと切望し、また自分の存在について漠然とでも考えるようになったであろう。マックレナン氏が述べているように、「人間は生命現象についてのある説明を、自分で考えだしたに違いない。そして、その説明が普遍的であるところから判断すると、人間が最初に思いついたもっとも複雑な仮設は、つぎのようなものであったと思われる。それは、自然現象は、動物や植物やその他のものに、さらに自然の緒力に、人間が自分自身もっているように意識しているのに似た、行動へとうながす霊が存在することによる、ということである。」タイラー氏が示唆しているように、夢が最初に霊の観念を生じさせたということも、考えられる。なぜなら、未開人たちは、主観的な印象と客観的な印象を容易に区別できないからである。*23 未開人が夢をみるとき、彼の前にたつ姿は、どこか遠方からきてそこに立っていると信じられるのである。*24 そうでなければ「夢を見ている人の魂が旅にでて、そこでみたものを記憶して帰ってきたのである」*25 といっても、想像力や好奇心や推理力などが人間の心のなかでかなりの程度に発達するまでは、イヌの場合とたいしてちがわないで、人間の夢は霊を信じさせるにはいたらなかったであろう。*26
*18 このこと自体が一つの進化論を支持せざるを得ない理由だと思う。というのは、知能の発達と神の創造との関連がわかるから。知能が発達したということを進化と認めるのはあまり議論の必要がないように感じる。もっとも、そうでないと主張することもできるとも思う。
*19 ここで、信仰と神との違いに注意。ダーウィンの記述から少なくとも、神は信仰の発達した段階において創造されたかもしれないと考えることができるだろう。もっとも、それを創造されたと表現するのは、神に対して一つの信頼をしていないという前提に基づいているけれども。
*20 想像力と推理力の違いに注意しないといけない。
*21 普遍的であるというのは、やはり、その人間存在の構造、そして世界の構造に共通があるということだろう。
*22 非常に深い洞察力だと思う。この推理の基礎は今後の進化の過程を予想するのに大きな参考となるだろう。
*23 これは、非常に我々の存在について知る大きな手がかりになるのは間違いなさそうなことである。主観と客観の区別がつくということが、一つの進歩の印と考えられている今からすると、そこに戻るということが、なにか退歩していると思えるように感じるかもしれない。
*24 ということは、そのようなことは現実でなく夢であると否定するのは、一つのプラグマティズム的発想が、我々の根源にあるということだろう。
*25 経験的に反駁されるということは、わからなかったのだろうか。
*26 ということは、やはり観念的な一切のものは - 例えば、正義であるとか道徳であるとかいうようなものでさえ - 人間の創造物、あるいは想像物であるということなのだろうか。心というものでもって、確かに我々は自己のうちにさえ形而上的な存在を認めることはできるのだけれども、それは一つの観念であるということにも違いはないのである。あるいは、あらゆるものが、創造や想像の結果にすぎないのだろうか。もちろん、そうであるという主張はある。ア・プリオリの構造により、自己と世界を分離的に思考した結果であるというのが一番、有力に主観と客観の解決ができるように感じる。
Exploring the Roots of Religion
Scope:
The most important record of religious history resides not in books and sacred texts but buried in the earth. Ancient graves, statues, temples, standing stones, sacrificial offerings, and places of initiation all bear witness to the universal human quest for spiritual power and understanding. Since the beginnings of scientific archaeology in the 18th century, excavators have been discovering and interpreting evidence ranging from tiny goddess figurines carved from mammoth ivory to entire sacred landscapes, such as at the Giza plateau in Egypt. The millennia of human experience that preceded the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago is only accessible to us through archaeology. And even for more recent religions and cults, the “testimony of the spade” providesan essential perspective that enhances our understanding of the literary tradition.
Archaeology provides evidence that is very different in nature from historical writings. With aerial reconnaissance and remote sensing technology, archaeologists relocate lost temples and othercult sites. With trowels and brushes, they gently remove the dust of ages from buried sites andartifacts. And with space-age laboratory techniques, they analyze the residues left by royal funeral feasts as well as the last meals of sacrificial victims.
Some 30,000 years before scribes made the firstreligious writings, Ice Age peoples of Europe and the Near East were creating shrines in caves,modeling images of divinities and shamans, and using art and music in ceremonies. Evenearlier, in the time of the Neanderthals, some of the tribe’s deceased were laid in their graveswith flowers, possibly symbolizing resurrection after death. The first theme of our course, “In the Beginning,” explores these earliest religious rites and the beliefs that inspired them, right down to the time of the first farmers and the construction of the first megalithic monuments.
Next we devote six of our lectures to the ritual activity that seems to lie at the very core of religion worldwide—namely, burial of the dead, under the theme “Quest for the Afterlife.” Beginning with the simple pit tombs of ordinary villagers in predynastic Egypt, whose bodies were naturally mummified in the dry sand of the Sahara, we move forward in time to the extraordinary graves of wealthy monarchs like the Viking queen Åsa, whose elaborate, treasure-filled tomb shows that at east some of our ancestors believed that you can take it with you. We also examine ambitious funeral architecture from Petra in Jordan to Easter Island in the Pacific and include a visit to the enigmatic burial mounds of prehistoric North America.
Another universal element in religion is ritual: the performance of traditional actions that range from dances to foretelling the future. Although such activities may seem ephemeral, they often leave clear traces in the archaeological record. Our third theme, “Reconstructing Ancient Rituals,” starts with a survey of the fertility cults of warriors and farmers in Bronze Age Scandinavia. Then we move on to Minoan bull dancing, Chinese and Greek divination, and Mayan ball games and human sacrifices. We conclude by examining a tour de force of scientific archaeology that has reconstructed, hour by hour, the last day in the life of a Celtic prince, possibly a Druid, who was sacrificed and buried in a bog at the time of the Roman conquest
of Britain.
This grisly ritual leads us into our fourth theme, “Lost Gods and Fallen Temples,” where human sacrifice becomes almost routine as part of the nearly superhuman efforts to glorify divine monarchs through monumental architecture, impressive ceremony, and above all spectacular funeral rites. The kings and queens of Ur in Mesopotamia (hometown of the biblical Abraham), the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of China and Rome, and the royalty of the ancient Americas have all left indelible marks of their status as gods, rather than as mere mortals.
The penultimate theme of the course, “Sacred Landscapes,” offers a tour of some of earth’s most famous ancient sites: Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, and others. These great achievements of ancient engineers in fact functioned as ceremonial centers, and it is our mission to understand the full range of remains at each site and to reconstruct the religious beliefs and worldviews that impelled ancient peoples in every corner of the globe to invest such vast expenditures of time, wealth, human power, and technical ingenuity to create stages for their religious rites and earthly images of the sacred cosmos. We also explore lesser-known ceremonial centers such as Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest and the Ajanta Caves of India.
In our final group of six lectures, under the theme “Communities of the Spirit,” we consider anumber of extinct religions in their totality. The best known of these is unquestionably the early monotheistic cult of the heretic Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who closed the temples of Ra and the other traditional gods and tried to impose the worship of a single god, Aten, throughout his kingdom. Similar grandeur attends the discoveries of the center for Aztec religious life at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City (formerly the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán), where recent excavations have brought to light a series of pyramids, offerings, and artworks that span the entire period of Aztec domination in Mesoamerica. The search for the ancient Persian cult of Mithras takes us deep underground to the buried chapels of his worshippers throughout the Roman Empire, while the city of Jenne-jeno in Africa yields evidence of a cult in which craftworkers, specifically ironsmiths, were regarded as diviners and religious leaders. Finally, viewing earth from space, we close with the mystery of the Nazca Desert in Peru, where gigantic images of animals and other designs laid out over great distances still defy the efforts of archaeologists to unlock their secrets.
Although this course focuses primarily on religions that belong to the ancient world, we will often pause to consider how archaeological finds shed unexpected light on the origins and rituals of such modern religions as Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Even today, most people’s religious experience is shaped not by theological creeds but by enduring traditions rooted in the remote past.
Lecture One - The Roots of Religious Experience
Scope:
Archaeology is the science of studying the past through its material remains. Religions may seem to center around theology, abstract beliefs, and codes of behavior, but the spiritual will inevitably be reflected in the physical world. The ways in which a people bury their dead, represent supernatural powers, ensure divine favor through offerings, and construct spaces for worship provide essential clues to their religious beliefs. To understand humanity, we must understand religion. Religious monuments often form the dominant element of a culture’s remains.
Archaeology provides the only surviving data about beliefs and rituals that developed during the ages preceding the invention of writing. Even for the historical period, excavations shed new light on aspects of religion that could never be known from written records. In this course we visit some of the most important sites around the globe in an exploration of the origins and development of religion.
Outline
I. This course will explore the roots of modern world religions but will also study some of the earliest religious expressions of faiths long dead, which we can only learn about through their archaeological remains.
II. Let’s start by explaining what archaeologists do and how our work differs from that of other historians. A. Archaeology is the science of studying the human past through its material remains: artifacts, buildings, sites, human remains, botanical and zoological remains, and alterations to the natural landscape.
B. Archaeologists collaborate with researchers in many fields to gain an interdisciplinary perspective on past cultures and civilizations, from the pollen in the air they breathed to the significance of the art they produced.
C. For the entire span of human existence before the invention of writing, archaeology provides our only evidence for human history and culture, including the development and spread of religions.
III. Let me introduce myself and tell you about my archaeological training and the various experiences and discoveries that have made the study of ancient religions a major part of my career as a fieldworker and scholar.
A. I grew up at the Falls of the Ohio River in New Albany, Indiana, on a hill where prehistoric hunters camped to watch for migrating bison herds preparing to ford the river. Ancient artifacts often turned up during construction projects or even just gardening in our neighborhood, and I became obsessed with the vestiges of the past worlds that lay hidden beneath our feet.
B. These early experiences grew into training at Yale and Cambridge and a career as an archaeologist. I have had opportunities to survey and explore prehistoric mounds in the Ohio River Valley; Celtic rituals in England; sacred rock art in Scandinavia; pagan and Christian religious structures at a Roman villa in Portugal; and oracle sites in Greece, Turkey, and Albania.
C. Reconstructing ancient religious rituals from their archaeological remains has become a central part of my life’s work. Some of the sites we visit during this course were chosen because of my desire to share with you my personal experience.
IV. What are our goals? I have three; you may have additional goals of your own.
A. First, we will approach our subject experientially, through visits to more than 30 important archaeological sites. Archaeology is visceral experience; I would like you to share in an encounter with the past that is as much physical as it is cerebral.
B. Second, you should expect to acquire a mass of knowledge about ancient religions and religious sites—to become “literate” in the subject. Both modern archaeological research projects and the mass of evidence from the sites themselves will be given due attention.
C. Finally, I hope you will come to the end of the course with a new view of religion and its role in human history: how it evolved, what its universal elements are, what aspects unify various religions throughout the world, and what aspects divide them—sometimes violently. It will be our mission to understand the spiritual force that drove people
to these heroic achievements. *1
Questions to Consider:
1. Would you expect the material remains of religion (sacred objects, places of worship, burials, and so on) to reflect the religious beliefs of its adherents directly?
2. Among contemporary religions, can you think of an example where material remains might seriously confuse archaeologists of the future? *2
*01 文字が開発される以前の神的ものに対する私達の態度をみることができる。
*02 答えは至って簡単。1はおそらく、そうであるものとそうでないものの2通りであるか、あるいは、全称的に肯定するか、否定するかの最大で4つの通りしか考えることしかできなく、それを決定的にすることはおそらくできぬというもの。2については、おそらく、宗教的意味合いが薄れて実用的なものとなったものだろう。
Lecture Two - Neanderthal Burials at Shanidar
Scope:
When Ralph Solecki of Columbia University and his wife Rose began to excavate at Shanidar Cave in 1951, the scholarly image of Neanderthals conformed to a caveman stereotype of brutish behavior and subhuman mental capacity. In levels that dated back to the Middle Paleolithic (more than 35,000 years ago), however, the Soleckis discovered that the Neanderthals had deliberately buried their dead in pits, curling the body into a fetal position and sometimes placing a stone slab over the grave. This revolutionary discovery remains the earliest incontrovertible religious site in the world. Much more controversial has been the Soleckis’ conclusion, based on pollen analysis, that Neanderthals placed their dead on soft beds of pine branches and filled the tombs with flowers. Evidence for Neanderthal cave shrines, skull cults, and worship of animal deities also remains hotly disputed.
Outline:
I. First, let’s look at the roadmap for the course so you understand where these lectures are going and how they fit together.
A. The course is divided into six groups of six lectures each.
B. The first set is called “In the Beginning.” It includes the introduction and the exploration of a series of sites that carry us back into the Stone Age.
C. In this set of lectures, we will discuss what kind of religious impulses come to us out of the period known as the Paleolithic.
II. Neanderthals were both very much like us and different from us.
A. We know about Neanderthals because of a series of discoveries of complete Neanderthal skeletons.
B. Neanderthals would have been shorter than we are, but their brains would have been the same size as ours, though arranged differently. *3
C. We know Neanderthals were much stronger than we are from the density of their bones, the mass of their long bones, and the large attachments for their muscles.
D. They also were extremely agile and swift on rough terrain, based on the massive strength that their skeletons reveal.
III. The shambling, dull-witted Neanderthal stereotype was promoted in the early 20th century.
A. Neanderthals were discovered in 1848 by British soldiers, working in the caves of Gibraltar.
B. In the 1850s, workers in the Neander Valley of Germany uncovered an old rock shelter where they found some unusual-looking humanoid bones.
C. In the early 1900s, an archaeologist working at a rock shelter in France found a skeleton of a Neanderthal on a bed of flint flakes with a hand resting near a beautiful axe.
1. The skeleton was arranged in the form of what is called a flexed burial, which looks like the fetal position.
2. The Neanderthals may have felt that this position was appropriate to someone going back into the womb of the earth. *4
3. The discovery caused a sensation because up until the early 20th century, no one believed such human forebears had religion.
D. Even as these discoveries were being made, Marcellin Boule took a very complete adult male Neanderthal skeleton from a rock shelter in the Dordogne Valley and clothed it in flesh, skin, and animal skins, creating the stereotype of the caveman.
IV. Decades later, along came a husband and wife team, Ralph and Rose Solecki.
A. In the 1950s, prehistorians were beginning to bring analytical techniques and scientific methods of the hard sciences to their study of early humans. Ralph was one of those pioneering archaeologists.
B. Between 1951 and 1960, the Soleckis carried out a number of field seasons in Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq. They discovered not only the remains of thousands of tools but the skeletons of nine Neanderthal individuals.
C. Ralph found the Shanidar 1 burial and worked out a very interesting scenario for the burial.
1. He was amazed when the bones were studied later and it turned out that this individual had many congenital disabilities.
2. From the obvious care taken with his burial, Ralph concluded that these were people of compassion. *5
D. In the Shanidar 4 burial, a palynologist found pockets of pollen that belonged to seven different early-summer-flowering plants that may have been bouquets woven into garlands around pine branches for the tomb.
E. Based on findings from Shanidar 4, Solecki felt that everything he had thought about Neanderthals had been turned on its head.
1. They were people who buried their dead not only with honor but with flowers, symbols of resurrection.
2. Interestingly, a number of those plants are medicinal.
V. Shanidar entered the world of popular culture in Jean Auel’s novel Clan of the Cave Bear.
A. The novel shows a group of people very different from us physically, somewhat different from us culturally, and yet united to us and maybe even anterior to us, preceding us in the area of religious ritual, religious belief, and symbolic religious behavior.
B. A part of the “cultural DNA” of the Shanidar burials has been handed down to us: a belief in something that transcends this earthly existence. *6
Questions to Consider:
1. What were your preconceptions about Neanderthals or prehistoric humans in general?
2. Would you agree that religious ideas about death and the afterlife form a logical “first step” in the development of religion? *7
*03 これは、脳というものについて考える時に大きな参考になると思う。
*04 これが、神秘性の起源なのだろうか。もっとも、一つの構造という答えに対して、なんら価値のない予想だけれども。その証拠立てになることはできるのかもしれない。というのは、それに対しての先天的な説明になることができるであろうから。しかし、依然としてア・プリオリに対しての「根源的な」解決にはなってはいない。
*05 これはいささか早急な、判断かもしれない。というのは、哀れみというよりは、単に有利であるからという理由に基づくことも可能ではあるから。もっとも、その埋葬方法についてはやはり、その意味についていろいろ推測することはできる。
*06 そう、結局はSomethingに帰結するのだろうか。
*07 これが、初期の宗教に対する始まりであるかどうかは不明だけれども、それと何かしらの関連はあるのかもしれない。
Lecture Three - Hunting Magic in Sacred Caves
Scope:
In 1940, a dog named Robot disappeared into a rocky cleft in south-central France, leading four young boys to the discovery of a lifetime: a previously unknown cave that was filled with extraordinary paintings of animals and various symbols created by Ice Age hunters. Among the images in the heart of the cave was a human figure wearing a bird-like mask, standing near a wounded bison. Archaeological study of the paintings and the cave deposits showed that the art was 15,000 years old. This cave, called Lascaux, is only the most elaborate of a constellation of painted caves in France and northern Spain. These rank among the world’s oldest religious shrines, although prehistorians continue to debate the meaning of the art and the nature of the ceremonies held by torchlight in these deep caverns. Hunting magic and the spiritual initiation of young hunters may have been the purpose behind the art.
Outline:
I. The origins of the human religious impulse, which consists of desiring to bury our dead and to pay them honor and reverence even after they have passed away*8, will be one of the strands that binds this course together.
A. In this lecture, we’re going to look at two more strands and their origins in the Paleolithic: the idea of sacred space and the emergence of a god or deity.
B. Both of those quests for origins take us back to northern Spain and southwestern France.
C. We have moved forward thousands of years, and the Neanderthals have vanished. We are with our own modern human ancestors and the world they left behind in what we call the Upper Paleolithic.
II. In 1878, a Spanish nobleman named Sautuola went to see a Paris exposition that featured cave art.
A. He was very excited by the exhibits and decided to explore a cave on his own estate in a hill called Altamira. The cave had been discovered by a huntsman seeking his lost dog.
B. During the exploration, Sautuola’s daughter, Maria, found that the cave’s ceiling was covered with paintings of extinct bison.
C. We know now that those remarkable paintings are about 15,000–16,000 years old.
D. French prehistorians dismissed the discovery at first, and it was years before they came around.
III. In France in 1940, four boys were out rabbit hunting near a place called Lascaux. In a strange repeat of what had happened at Altamira, one boy’s dog disappeared.
A. When they followed the sound of the dog’s barking, they found something even more spectacular than Altamira.
B. The first impression that the Lascaux paintings made was that this place was all about hunting magic, or
sympathetic magic.
C. It seemed possible that these caves were chambers of initiation for rites of passage involving young hunters.
D. André Leroi-Gourhan, on the other hand, suggests that the symbolism in these paintings is about an opposition, or perhaps a conjunction, between male and female.*9
IV. In the years between the discovery of Altamira and that great exhibition in Paris in 1878, a new class of small art had begun to appear.
A. There was a group of figurines or statuettes called Venus figurines, revealing an element of femininity that was lacking from early discoveries.
B. In France, outside a cave at Laussel, a slab of stone was discovered on which there was a woman, a mother-goddess figure.
V. There is a lot of evidence about how cave art was created.
A. We found little lamps, sometimes filled with animal fat, used to light the work while it was going on.
B. A study of the pigments shows the few colors that were basic to this art form and the ingredients from which they were made.
C. Not only were the lines sometimes incised, but the color was sometimes blown on through a little blow gun.
D. We also know that these wonderful rituals could be accompanied by music.
E. Some paintings seem to have been placed in areas of the caves specifically for their resonance. *10
Questions to Consider:
1. Some scholars regard Paleolithic cave art as simply “art for art’s sake.” Does this seem reasonable to you?
2. Animals play a central role in cave art. What role do they play in the iconography of contemporary religions? *11
*08 これには、まだ多少の疑問が残る。というのは、神的なものを考えていたかは、どこまででも断言できぬし、さらに、それが他者への思いやりゆえの敬意というよりは、単に利己的な死への畏怖からそうしただけなのかもしれないのだから。もちろん、このように考えることも十分にできるということは注意したい。
*09 まさに、馬鹿げた議論の一つになる要素を秘めた類のもの。
*10 後期ハイデガーの聴覚に対する興味というのもこのようなものからなのだろうか。
「 認識のモデルとして視覚以外に、聴覚や触覚が考えられる。『存在と時間』の現象学は、『現象がそのうちで視られうる光』を見る。しかし後期ハイデガーは視覚モデルでなく、聴覚モデルに移行する。それは『言葉への道』であり、人間は言葉（大文字のロゴス）を聴き、その言葉に応じて語ることとして語る（終章第一節）（略）しかしともかくハイデガーの思惟の道を全体として語るならば、『光をみることからロゴス（言葉）を聴くことへ』と定式化できるだろう。（ハイデガー入門 細川亮一 ちくま新書 2001 p107）
認識に対する視覚の優位性は古来より説かれていたとどこかで、みたけれども、原始的には、それと同様に聴覚も非常に何かを認識する時に大切なものであったかもしれない。あるいは、認識というよりは、それが与える人間の影響が大きかった（今と比べての相対的意味合いで）といえるのかもしれない。
*11 1について。このようなことはどこまでも断言はできるような類のものではない。しかし、確かに、芸術というものは、ある程度の知能と豊かさが必要となることから、そうはいえないのかもしれない。つまり、やはりそこには宗教的意味合いがあったということ。そもそも、芸術と宗教とに関連は認められるものである。2について。それは、昔ながらの言い伝えを信じている人にとって、ある特定の生物は神聖であるだとか、食してはいけないだとかいうような役割だろう。
Lecture Four - Myths of the Shaman
Scope:
Early European visitors to South Africa encountered paintings, some of them apparently of great antiquity, on rock faces in the Kalahari. Their discovery predated the first finds of painted Stone Age caves in Europe, and the art of the San peoples was consequently classed as decorative art or, more dismissively, “prehistoric wallpaper.” Anthropologists and archaeologists in recent decades have been able to demonstrate that the rock art is in fact religious. Specific images and scenes can be linked to the religious mythology of the San, and in some cases to specific rituals. As in the much older painted caves of France and Spain, San rock art often seems concerned with hunting magic. Animals, such as the eland, are prominent in San myths and also in San art; some large beasts are also depicted surrounded by humans in rainmaking ceremonies. *12
Outline:
I. This entire world of ideas, of actions, of things left behind, introduces us to the idea of cognitive archaeology, which tries to go beyond a mere record of what was left and a reconstruction of what the technology was that created it, all the way into the cognitive processes that led religious specialists to create. *13
II. We can see the first of these religious specialists in Lascaux Cave.
A. We call such a person a shaman, a term that came into scholarly thought and parlance from stories of Siberian tribes who had religious specialists.
B. In Lascaux, modern investigators found a scene involving a confrontation among several figures: a wounded bison being hunted, a human it seems to be charging, and a bird that mimics the shape of the man’s head.
C. One of the elements of shamanism involved dealing with animal spirits and sometimes assuming the spirit of an animal to pass into the spirit world. Perhaps the third figure represents such a shaman.
D. Confirmation that shamans dressed up as animals can be found in the French cave of Trois Frères, where two cave paintings show parts of animals worn by humans. *14
III. This introduces us to this world of the shaman.
A. Shamans were found wherever there were groups of people living together as bands or tribes who felt some sort kinship.
B. Tribal and band societies and our earliest ancestors typically did not specialize. The shaman was an exception.
C. The previous shaman trained the new shaman.
D. Often the most important religious things are shrouded by a veil of secrecy; so it was with shamanism.
E. In the 19th century, two Native American shamans felt they had come to the end of their tradition and told their stories. *15
IV. Shamans are found all over the world. However, we will focus on shamans of the Kalahari Desert.
A. Here groups lived by hunting and gathering well into the 20th century.
B. In The Hunters, John Marshall followed four hunters, including one shaman, around the Kalahari Desert. The shaman’s task was to be in touch with the spirits of the animals and to lead the hunters to those animals. *16
V. Our record for the shamanistic tradition in South Africa is rock art.
A. Brian Fagan uses this rock art as an example of putting shamanism into visible form.
B. The people of that area interviewed in the 19th and 20th centuries explained that their shamans had different functions, including rainmaking and hunting, linking them with the earliest times.
C. What do we see in some of these panels of rock art?
1. Like the Paleolithic caves in France and Spain, they often show us animals. *17
2. They sometimes show scenes between humans and animals that seem imagined rather than real—scenes of religious ritual.
D. Individual shamans are shown with peck marks and little dots all over their bodies. It has been suggested that these show us that boiling feeling inside when one is slipping into the trance.
E. Shamans in the Kalahari Desert used whirling, music, chanting, intense concentration, or breath control to slip into that place from which they could access the spirit world.
*12 詳細がないから、詳しくはわからないけれども、確かに単に他の目的がなく、ただそれだけのための目的であった。つまり、単なる芸術活動を試みていたということはありそうもないことであると思う。
*13 インドのカースト制を考える時、そして、何か宗教に携わるものに神聖な地位を与えるということを考える時、何か我々はそれに対して特別なものを抱くということは十分に考えることができるものである。しかし、依然としてやはりその理由というものは、推論の領域でしかないし、ここまでからの記述からでは理解できないと思う。
*14 動物の力を得ようとしていたのだろうか。とにかく、確かに、このようなものからは、現代の常識的な意味における認識とは異なる認識をしていたと考えられる。それは、意味において決定的に違うということ。
*15 これらのどの文でも、様々なことに対してその非常に大きな意味を語ることができるだろう。集団と個。そして、宗教者と俗人。伝統と現実など。
*16 世界のどのシャーマンも、役割は同じだったのだろうか。*17を考慮に入れるなら、このことは十分に考慮にいれるべきことであるだろう。
*17 ダーウィンがいうような進化論ということが、ここでもその正当性を確保されるということだろうか。
神の信仰-宗教。人間が本来的に、全能の神の存在についての高貴な信仰を付与されているという証拠はまったくない。それどころか、急ぎの足の旅行者ではなく未開人と長くいっしょに暮らした人たちが、唯一神あるいは多数の神についてなんの観念ももたず、そのような観念を表現する言葉ももたない人種が、過去にたくさんあったし現在もたくさんあるということについて、数多くの証言をしている。この問題はいうまでもなく、宇宙を創造し支配する者が存在するかどうかという、もっと高尚な問題とは、まったくちがったものである。そしてこの後者の問題は、過去において最高の知者である若干の人たちから、肯定的に答えられてきた。*18
だが、もしも<宗教>という語に、目に見えない、つまり心霊的なはたらきへの信仰ということを含めるならば事情は全くちがってくる。なぜなら、このような信仰は文明の低い人種では普遍的であるように思われるからである。*19 どうしてそのような信仰が生じたかということを理解するのも、難しいことではない。想像力、驚異心、好奇心といった重要な諸能力、それに加えて若干の推理の力*20が、部分的に発達してくると、人は当然、身のまわりでおこっていることを理解しようと切望し、また自分の存在について漠然とでも考えるようになったであろう。マックレナン氏が述べているように、「人間は生命現象についてのある説明を、自分で考えだしたに違いない。そして、その説明が普遍的であるところから判断すると、人間が最初に思いついたもっとも複雑な仮設は、つぎのようなものであったと思われる。それは、自然現象は、動物や植物やその他のものに、さらに自然の緒力に、人間が自分自身もっているように意識しているのに似た、行動へとうながす霊が存在することによる、ということである。」タイラー氏が示唆しているように、夢が最初に霊の観念を生じさせたということも、考えられる。なぜなら、未開人たちは、主観的な印象と客観的な印象を容易に区別できないからである。*23 未開人が夢をみるとき、彼の前にたつ姿は、どこか遠方からきてそこに立っていると信じられるのである。*24 そうでなければ「夢を見ている人の魂が旅にでて、そこでみたものを記憶して帰ってきたのである」*25 といっても、想像力や好奇心や推理力などが人間の心のなかでかなりの程度に発達するまでは、イヌの場合とたいしてちがわないで、人間の夢は霊を信じさせるにはいたらなかったであろう。*26
*18 このこと自体が一つの進化論を支持せざるを得ない理由だと思う。というのは、知能の発達と神の創造との関連がわかるから。知能が発達したということを進化と認めるのはあまり議論の必要がないように感じる。もっとも、そうでないと主張することもできるとも思う。
*19 ここで、信仰と神との違いに注意。ダーウィンの記述から少なくとも、神は信仰の発達した段階において創造されたかもしれないと考えることができるだろう。もっとも、それを創造されたと表現するのは、神に対して一つの信頼をしていないという前提に基づいているけれども。
*20 想像力と推理力の違いに注意しないといけない。
*21 普遍的であるというのは、やはり、その人間存在の構造、そして世界の構造に共通があるということだろう。
*22 非常に深い洞察力だと思う。この推理の基礎は今後の進化の過程を予想するのに大きな参考となるだろう。
*23 これは、非常に我々の存在について知る大きな手がかりになるのは間違いなさそうなことである。主観と客観の区別がつくということが、一つの進歩の印と考えられている今からすると、そこに戻るということが、なにか退歩していると思えるように感じるかもしれない。
*24 ということは、そのようなことは現実でなく夢であると否定するのは、一つのプラグマティズム的発想が、我々の根源にあるということだろう。
*25 経験的に反駁されるということは、わからなかったのだろうか。
*26 ということは、やはり観念的な一切のものは - 例えば、正義であるとか道徳であるとかいうようなものでさえ - 人間の創造物、あるいは想像物であるということなのだろうか。心というものでもって、確かに我々は自己のうちにさえ形而上的な存在を認めることはできるのだけれども、それは一つの観念であるということにも違いはないのである。あるいは、あらゆるものが、創造や想像の結果にすぎないのだろうか。もちろん、そうであるという主張はある。ア・プリオリの構造により、自己と世界を分離的に思考した結果であるというのが一番、有力に主観と客観の解決ができるように感じる。
The Greatest Show on Earth - The Evidence for Evolution Richard Dawkins 2009
CHAPTER 2 DOGS, COWS AND CABBAGES
WHY did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier? Many answers have been suggested. Perhaps minds were cowed by the sheer time it must take for great change to occur – by the mismatch between what we now call geological deep time and the lifespan and comprehension of the person trying to understand it. Perhaps it was religious indoctrination that held us back. Or perhaps it was the daunting complexity of a living organ such as an eye, freighted as it is with the beguiling illusion of design by a master engineer. Probably all those played a role. But Ernst Mayr, grand old man of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, repeatedly voiced a different suspicion. For Mayr, the culprit was the ancient philosophical doctrine of – to give it its modern name – essentialism. The discovery of evolution was held back by the dead hand of Plato.
THE DEAD HAND OF PLATO
For Plato, the ‘reality’ that we think we see is just shadows cast on the wall of our cave by the flickering light of the camp fire. Like other classical Greek thinkers, Plato was at heart a geometer. Every triangle drawn in the sand is but an imperfect shadow of the true essence of triangle. The lines of the essential triangle are pure Euclidean lines with length but no breadth, lines defined as infinitely narrow and as never meeting when parallel. The angles of the essential triangle really do add up to exactly two right angles, not a picosecond of arc more or less. This is not true of a triangle drawn in the sand: but the triangle in the sand, for Plato, is but an unstable shadow of the ideal, essential triangle.*1
How desperately unevolutionary that picture is! The Platonist regards any change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change – as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of lifes radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants. Indeed, Alfred Russel Wallace, independent co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection, actually called his paper ‘On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type’.*2
*1 これは、おそらくイデアの限界であると思う。その意味で、洞窟の比喩と、ニーチェの真理批判とは違う意味だろう。しかし、より高次の次元から考えるとそれは些細な違いに過ぎないとおもう。というのは、イデアというものが、まさにニーチェの言葉を借りるなら、遠近法的仮像なのだから。そして、それも、ご存知の通り影の思想なのだから。その意味で、ビトゲンシュタインと同じ。その限りで、無我の思想というのが、もっとも完成された思想のうちの一つになるのかもしれない。
*2 やはり、今日の進化論的にはイデアの思想は批判されるものかもしれないが、おそらく、そのような批判はプラトンの主張を文字通りの意味にしか、表面的にしか理解してないものがするのだろう。洞窟の比喩とイデアということを考慮するなら。というのは、何かのイデアを正確には、知覚できないのだから。つまり、もし、ある特定の対象について、あるイデアを想起したとしても、それは影にすぎないのだから、イデアというものが、一つの仮定にすぎないということを前提としているから。
このようなことから、理論モデルではなくて、実際の具体的な人間のア・プリオリと、ア・ポステリオリとの関連の探求が今後の課題になるのではないだろうか。しかし、ある人にとっては、それは、完全にア・プリオリだと思うけれども。というのは、因果律を純粋に受け入れるとそうなるのだから。もっとも、ア・プリオリすら超越しているということはできると思う。そのような意味で、神の存在を肯定はできるだろうし、事実、正確にこのような方法ではないと思うけれど、信仰とはそのような形で成り立つと説明されてきた。だけれども、その信仰も、形而下に還元される時、誤りになるという問題点を抱えていることに注意しなければならない。人間的であるということを。
If there is a ‘standard rabbit’, the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities. What used to be the longer-eared end of the old distribution may find itself the centre of a new distribution later in geological time. Given a sufficiently large number of generations, there may be no overlap between ancestral and descendant distributions: the longest ears among the ancestors may be shorter than the shortest ears among the descendants. All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors. Yet in no generation during the evolutionary process was the predominant type in the population far from the modal type in the previous generation or the following generation. This way of thinking is what Mayr called population thinking. Population thinking, for him, was the antithesis of essentialism. According to Mayr, the reason Darwin was such an unconscionable time arriving on the scene was that we all – whether because of Greek influence or for some other reason – have essentialism burned into our mental DNA.*3
*3 結局は、イデアの基礎の元、ヘーゲルの弁証的方法を進化論的な意味での使用でやっているに過ぎないのか。あるいは、それは過ぎないという表現で軽視してはいけなくて、我々に決定的な避けることのできない、そして逆に、それどころかこのような思想にしか還元できないということなのであろうか。
CHAPTER 2 DOGS, COWS AND CABBAGES
WHY did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity’s tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier – or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier? Many answers have been suggested. Perhaps minds were cowed by the sheer time it must take for great change to occur – by the mismatch between what we now call geological deep time and the lifespan and comprehension of the person trying to understand it. Perhaps it was religious indoctrination that held us back. Or perhaps it was the daunting complexity of a living organ such as an eye, freighted as it is with the beguiling illusion of design by a master engineer. Probably all those played a role. But Ernst Mayr, grand old man of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, repeatedly voiced a different suspicion. For Mayr, the culprit was the ancient philosophical doctrine of – to give it its modern name – essentialism. The discovery of evolution was held back by the dead hand of Plato.
THE DEAD HAND OF PLATO
For Plato, the ‘reality’ that we think we see is just shadows cast on the wall of our cave by the flickering light of the camp fire. Like other classical Greek thinkers, Plato was at heart a geometer. Every triangle drawn in the sand is but an imperfect shadow of the true essence of triangle. The lines of the essential triangle are pure Euclidean lines with length but no breadth, lines defined as infinitely narrow and as never meeting when parallel. The angles of the essential triangle really do add up to exactly two right angles, not a picosecond of arc more or less. This is not true of a triangle drawn in the sand: but the triangle in the sand, for Plato, is but an unstable shadow of the ideal, essential triangle.*1
How desperately unevolutionary that picture is! The Platonist regards any change in rabbits as a messy departure from the essential rabbit, and there will always be resistance to change – as if all real rabbits were tethered by an invisible elastic cord to the Essential Rabbit in the Sky. The evolutionary view of lifes radically opposite. Descendants can depart indefinitely from the ancestral form, and each departure becomes a potential ancestor to future variants. Indeed, Alfred Russel Wallace, independent co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection, actually called his paper ‘On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type’.*2
*1 これは、おそらくイデアの限界であると思う。その意味で、洞窟の比喩と、ニーチェの真理批判とは違う意味だろう。しかし、より高次の次元から考えるとそれは些細な違いに過ぎないとおもう。というのは、イデアというものが、まさにニーチェの言葉を借りるなら、遠近法的仮像なのだから。そして、それも、ご存知の通り影の思想なのだから。その意味で、ビトゲンシュタインと同じ。その限りで、無我の思想というのが、もっとも完成された思想のうちの一つになるのかもしれない。
*2 やはり、今日の進化論的にはイデアの思想は批判されるものかもしれないが、おそらく、そのような批判はプラトンの主張を文字通りの意味にしか、表面的にしか理解してないものがするのだろう。洞窟の比喩とイデアということを考慮するなら。というのは、何かのイデアを正確には、知覚できないのだから。つまり、もし、ある特定の対象について、あるイデアを想起したとしても、それは影にすぎないのだから、イデアというものが、一つの仮定にすぎないということを前提としているから。
このようなことから、理論モデルではなくて、実際の具体的な人間のア・プリオリと、ア・ポステリオリとの関連の探求が今後の課題になるのではないだろうか。しかし、ある人にとっては、それは、完全にア・プリオリだと思うけれども。というのは、因果律を純粋に受け入れるとそうなるのだから。もっとも、ア・プリオリすら超越しているということはできると思う。そのような意味で、神の存在を肯定はできるだろうし、事実、正確にこのような方法ではないと思うけれど、信仰とはそのような形で成り立つと説明されてきた。だけれども、その信仰も、形而下に還元される時、誤りになるという問題点を抱えていることに注意しなければならない。人間的であるということを。
If there is a ‘standard rabbit’, the accolade denotes no more than the centre of a bell-shaped distribution of real, scurrying, leaping, variable bunnies. And the distribution shifts with time. As generations go by, there may gradually come a point, not clearly defined, when the norm of what we call rabbits will have departed so far as to deserve a different name. There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities. What used to be the longer-eared end of the old distribution may find itself the centre of a new distribution later in geological time. Given a sufficiently large number of generations, there may be no overlap between ancestral and descendant distributions: the longest ears among the ancestors may be shorter than the shortest ears among the descendants. All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors. Yet in no generation during the evolutionary process was the predominant type in the population far from the modal type in the previous generation or the following generation. This way of thinking is what Mayr called population thinking. Population thinking, for him, was the antithesis of essentialism. According to Mayr, the reason Darwin was such an unconscionable time arriving on the scene was that we all – whether because of Greek influence or for some other reason – have essentialism burned into our mental DNA.*3
*3 結局は、イデアの基礎の元、ヘーゲルの弁証的方法を進化論的な意味での使用でやっているに過ぎないのか。あるいは、それは過ぎないという表現で軽視してはいけなくて、我々に決定的な避けることのできない、そして逆に、それどころかこのような思想にしか還元できないということなのであろうか。
Lecture 01
Scope :
This lecture summarizes the organization of Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations. First, we stress that the course is a narrative story of world prehistory--human history before humans developed documentary records--based on scientific evidence. Second, we summarize the organization of the course
into six sections, beginning with human origins and the archaic world, then describing the emergence and spread of modern humans, the beginnings of food production, and the world’s earliest preindustrial civilizations. Finally, we discuss the pervasive issues of the course, which include emerging human biological and cultural diversity, as well as our similarities; the importance of climatic and environmental change; and the consideration of prehistory as a chronicle of people, not just archaeological sites. We also stress the importance of the intangible beliefs of the ancients to the understanding of human prehistory.
Outline :
I. This course describes more than two and a half million years of the human past, from our origins among the apes in eastern Africa to the appearance of literate urban civilizations in southwestern Asia some 5,000 years ago. We also describe the early civilizations that developed in Asia and the Americas, ending our story with the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru.
A. This course is a narrative of prehistoric times, the thousands of years of preliterate history, a story that could not be told until about a half century ago, because the archaeological record was so incomplete in many places. It still is, but we can least give a preliminary account. By prehistory, we mean the human past
before written records in the conventional historical meaning of the word came into being. *1
*1 ではどのようにして、記述が不完全もしくは、ないものについての歴史を理解できるというのであろうか。
B. This is a course about world prehistory, the study of the human past on a global level, a phenomenon that has been made possible by the development of radiocarbon dating after World War II and by a massive expansion of archaeologists and archaeological research into many hitherto unexplored parts of the world since the 1950s.
*1 → radiocarbon dating
C. This course is based on research in many academic disciplines, among them archaeology, oral history, and the incomplete written records of the early civilizations. This is a narrative based on science and scientific research, much of it conducted within the past thirty years.
D. This is a course about human prehistory constructed from scientific research. It is not an account of the past based on fantasy, unsubstantiated legend, or science fiction, none of which has a place in our story.
1. Science has laid out a linear view of the 2.5 million years of prehistory, reconstructed from a jigsaw puzzle of excavations, archaeological surveys, and scientific dating methods. Such a linear chronology is the framework for our story, something very different from the cyclical visions of time espoused by many ancient and traditional societies, which were, or are, often driven by the passage of the seasons.
2. Prehistory ended at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 5,000 years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia but as recently as the twentieth century in some areas of New Guinea. The prehistory of each area of the world runs according to a different clock and ends at different times. The chronological line is, therefore, “jagged” for the end of prehistory everywhere. *3
*3 これは、今後の我々の未来について、どのような方向に歴史が流れていくのかを考える時、マクロ的な視野でそれを考えたい場合、とても大きなヒントがあるかもしれない。
II. The course is divided into six sections, which coincide with major developments in prehistoric times.
A. Section I, “Beginnings,” describes the archaic world of the first humans. We discuss the controversial subject of human origins in East Africa, the fossil evidence for hominid evolution, the archaeological sites, and theories about early human behavior.
1. Then we discuss the evolution of later, more advanced humans and their simple hunter-gatherer societies, chronicling their spread over the Old World after 2 million years ago (mya).
2. Section I ends with archaic forms of Homo sapiens, especially the European Neanderthals of 100,000 to 30,000 years ago.
B. Section II, “Modern Humans,” begins with the controversies surrounding the origins of Homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans.
1. We then trace their spread across the Old World and into the Americas during the late Ice Age, between about 100,000 and 15,000 years ago.
2. This was a period of tremendous innovations in human society, such as new, more sophisticated technologies; the first open-water navigation; and the appearance of both art and a rich symbolic life as a new part of human experience.
C. Section III, “Farmers and Herders,” begins immediately after the end of the Great Ice Age, in about 10,000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers in Southwest Asia suddenly start cultivating cereal grasses. We examine some of the theories that seek to explain the changeover, then visit early farming sites in the region.
1. Food production also took hold in other regions independently of Southwest Asia, among them, South Asia (rice) and East Asia (cereals and rice). We analyze these developments and the first appearance of cultivation in the Americas, in about 5,000 B.C.
2. We tell the story of the spread of farming into Europe, perhaps in part the result of a great natural cataclysm, and survey the colonization of the offshore islands of the Pacific, the last landmasses to be colonized by prehistoric humans.
Scope :
This lecture summarizes the organization of Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations. First, we stress that the course is a narrative story of world prehistory--human history before humans developed documentary records--based on scientific evidence. Second, we summarize the organization of the course
into six sections, beginning with human origins and the archaic world, then describing the emergence and spread of modern humans, the beginnings of food production, and the world’s earliest preindustrial civilizations. Finally, we discuss the pervasive issues of the course, which include emerging human biological and cultural diversity, as well as our similarities; the importance of climatic and environmental change; and the consideration of prehistory as a chronicle of people, not just archaeological sites. We also stress the importance of the intangible beliefs of the ancients to the understanding of human prehistory.
Outline :
I. This course describes more than two and a half million years of the human past, from our origins among the apes in eastern Africa to the appearance of literate urban civilizations in southwestern Asia some 5,000 years ago. We also describe the early civilizations that developed in Asia and the Americas, ending our story with the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru.
A. This course is a narrative of prehistoric times, the thousands of years of preliterate history, a story that could not be told until about a half century ago, because the archaeological record was so incomplete in many places. It still is, but we can least give a preliminary account. By prehistory, we mean the human past
before written records in the conventional historical meaning of the word came into being. *1
*1 ではどのようにして、記述が不完全もしくは、ないものについての歴史を理解できるというのであろうか。
B. This is a course about world prehistory, the study of the human past on a global level, a phenomenon that has been made possible by the development of radiocarbon dating after World War II and by a massive expansion of archaeologists and archaeological research into many hitherto unexplored parts of the world since the 1950s.
*1 → radiocarbon dating
C. This course is based on research in many academic disciplines, among them archaeology, oral history, and the incomplete written records of the early civilizations. This is a narrative based on science and scientific research, much of it conducted within the past thirty years.
D. This is a course about human prehistory constructed from scientific research. It is not an account of the past based on fantasy, unsubstantiated legend, or science fiction, none of which has a place in our story.
1. Science has laid out a linear view of the 2.5 million years of prehistory, reconstructed from a jigsaw puzzle of excavations, archaeological surveys, and scientific dating methods. Such a linear chronology is the framework for our story, something very different from the cyclical visions of time espoused by many ancient and traditional societies, which were, or are, often driven by the passage of the seasons.
2. Prehistory ended at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 5,000 years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia but as recently as the twentieth century in some areas of New Guinea. The prehistory of each area of the world runs according to a different clock and ends at different times. The chronological line is, therefore, “jagged” for the end of prehistory everywhere. *3
*3 これは、今後の我々の未来について、どのような方向に歴史が流れていくのかを考える時、マクロ的な視野でそれを考えたい場合、とても大きなヒントがあるかもしれない。
II. The course is divided into six sections, which coincide with major developments in prehistoric times.
A. Section I, “Beginnings,” describes the archaic world of the first humans. We discuss the controversial subject of human origins in East Africa, the fossil evidence for hominid evolution, the archaeological sites, and theories about early human behavior.
1. Then we discuss the evolution of later, more advanced humans and their simple hunter-gatherer societies, chronicling their spread over the Old World after 2 million years ago (mya).
2. Section I ends with archaic forms of Homo sapiens, especially the European Neanderthals of 100,000 to 30,000 years ago.
B. Section II, “Modern Humans,” begins with the controversies surrounding the origins of Homo sapiens sapiens, modern humans.
1. We then trace their spread across the Old World and into the Americas during the late Ice Age, between about 100,000 and 15,000 years ago.
2. This was a period of tremendous innovations in human society, such as new, more sophisticated technologies; the first open-water navigation; and the appearance of both art and a rich symbolic life as a new part of human experience.
C. Section III, “Farmers and Herders,” begins immediately after the end of the Great Ice Age, in about 10,000 B.C., when hunter-gatherers in Southwest Asia suddenly start cultivating cereal grasses. We examine some of the theories that seek to explain the changeover, then visit early farming sites in the region.
1. Food production also took hold in other regions independently of Southwest Asia, among them, South Asia (rice) and East Asia (cereals and rice). We analyze these developments and the first appearance of cultivation in the Americas, in about 5,000 B.C.
2. We tell the story of the spread of farming into Europe, perhaps in part the result of a great natural cataclysm, and survey the colonization of the offshore islands of the Pacific, the last landmasses to be colonized by prehistoric humans.
BBC - Yellowstone.Battle.for.Life.Part1.Winter
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Yellowstone is a BBC nature documentary series broadcast from 15 March 2009. Narrated by Peter Firth , the series takes a look at a year in the life of Yellowstone National Park , examining how its wildlife adapts to living in one of the harshest wildernesses on Earth. Yellowstone debuted on BBC Two at 8:00pm on Sunday 15 March 2009 and has three episodes. Each 50-minute episode was followed by a ten-minute film called Yellowstone People,featuring visitors to the Park and locals who had assisted theproduction team. The series was the channel's highest-rated naturalhistory documentary in over five years with audiences peaking at overfour million.[1] In the USA , an edited version of the series was broadcast under the title Yellowstone: Battle for Life. It aired as a two-hour TV special , and premiered on Animal Planet on 22 March 2009. The series was one of the most popular titles at BBC Worldwide'sannual market for international clients with pre-sales to nineterritories including Spain (Canal+), Germany (WDR), Russia (Channel 1)and Italy (RTI).[2] |
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1. "Winter"
With temperatures plunging to –40°C and several metres of snowfall,Yellowstone freezes solid for six months each year. In the extremecold, moisture in the air freezes, creating diamond dust . The severe winter is the greatest challenge facing the Park's animals, but for the wolf ,it is the season of opportunity. The film follows the Druid pack, oneof the largest in Yellowstone, as they stalk ever-weakening prey. Asherds of elk move to sheltered valleys at the edge of the Park, the wolves lie in wait. Other scavengers such as coyotes bald eagles also take advantage of wolf kills. On the open plateau, bison are built to endure the worst of the winter, bulldozing their waythrough deep snow to reach grass. In the harshest winter for a decade,even they are forced to move, following a thermal river to a geyser field. The grass here is laced with silica and arsenic – if the bison stay too long, it will poison them. Aerial shots reveal the tracks of otters and coyotes moving through the snow. The coyote steals a trout stashed beneath the ice of Yellowstone Lake by the otters. The red fox is another year-round resident, listening for and pouncing on micemoving under six feet of snow. By the end of March, winter has loosenedits grip, and the emergence of grizzly bears from hibernation in their mountain dens signals the approach of spring. Yellowstone People follows another winter resident, roof shoveler Jeff Henry.[6] and |
