Talk:Prehistoric religion

Background section

Congratulations on the mammoth overhaul of this article, Vaticidalprophet. Big overview topics like this aren't easy. But the background section makes some sweeping (and incorrect) statements about the study of prehistoric religion that are not matched with high quality sources. Specifically:

• This blog post by a classical historian is cited five times but it is not a reliable source and massively over-simplifies the theory behind ethnographic analogy in prehistory.
• The founder effect in paleontology, a field pioneered by nineteenth-century secular humanists who found religion a threat to their evolution-based field of study, stymied the early attribution of a religious motive to prehistoric humans – an interesting hypothesis but needs more than a citation to one paper in an obscure journal, or at least shouldn't be presented as fact.
• Using modern hunter-gatherers as a basis to understand prehistoric society is a substantial component of prehistoricism as a field, if one prone to recurring pitfalls where heterogeneous groups of hunter-gatherers are lumped together into an overarching whole – but the cited source is talking just about prehistoric demography. Also, I've never heard 'prehistoricism' used this way, why not just say "prehistory" here?
• The last paragraph again states as fact what should be attributed as the view of specific scholars and presented alongside alternative views. Hayden and Price are both somewhat outside the mainstream and there is a substantial body of literature that critiques 'shamanism' as a term so loosely defined as to be meaningless. This problem is repeated in the lead and the Paleolithic section.

And in general what's missing is a sense that almost all of what follows is highly speculative and dependent on who you ask. For a long time most archaeologists thought that prehistoric religion was not accessible to us with the evidence we have, and many still do. – Joe (talk) 07:31, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments, Joe (n.b. I have the article watchlisted and so don't need pings). I don't own the article any more than any editor owns any; I'm happy for you to qualify some statements, and I've tried to make it clear when I'm referring to authors who are talking somewhat outside the mainstream, although the strength of this clarity definitely varies a bit by sections (I was mostly focusing on it as regards Neanderthal religion, where some interpretations are definitely more...bullish...than others). My understanding is Devereaux, as an academic in a related field, is citable per the "subject matter expert" clause of SPS; I was primarily going for "the first source available to hand" for this, and particularly for something fairly accessible to general readers. I'm perfectly happy to see a more airtight source switched in, although I think it's a worthwhile exercise to cite things genpop readers can easily access so they can read further for themselves; the blogpost is not quite enough for a further reading section, but there might be some use to footnoting? I'm also perfectly happy to see the humanism hypothesis attributed. Broadly speaking, although I've worked plenty on this and may be able to claim "stewardship" in the sense OWN describes, I'm no owner and I'd be happy to see you attribute or soften anything you think crosses into unencyclopedicism. I've broadly gone for making the article a coherent work, if that makes sense, over trying to represent every element of the huge shamanism debate (which 1. absolutely deserves its own article and 2. accordingly means this overview aticle needs to summary style it); there is probably a good argument for at least way more footnoting than I've done. (There is probably a good argument that you can read the article and figure out what my position on the topic is, which probably means the pole needs to be pushed upright :) ) Vaticidalprophet 07:46, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't think you will find a source that can just be switched in for the ACOUP blog post because most of what he says about archaeological evidence is over-simplified, irrelevant and/or wrong. According to the about page the author is an expert in the Roman military so I think it's a bit of a stretch to invoke that clause of WP:SPS for this article. So if you don't object I'll just go ahead and remove it. – Joe (talk) 08:00, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Feel free; do you have any good suggestions for a decently accessible (I generally prefer having at least the first couple sources in an article being something most readers can check for themselves; I vaguely recall a WMF study finding those were the ones they were by far most likely to look at) description of the way the available forms of evidence to paleontologists complicates this kind of thing? (Especially comparing it discussing the forms of evidence available to written-era historians, which I found to be the most useful element of citing that source.) Vaticidalprophet 08:04, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Accessible, not really... but I just added a reference to a good summary in Gamble and I imagine it's covered in most introductory archaeology textbooks. Googling "Hawke's ladder" might help. – Joe (talk) 08:36, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion:

• Qeshm Museum-Iran 2018.jpg
• Reconstructed Krapina Neanderthals, cropped.png

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 09:36, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

To talk to the bot to keep a more accessible log of changes than the article's history section: the latter image is now replaced with the confidently-free File:Gib neanderthals.jpg. Will look for a good substitute for the former; I suspected I'd need a better image for that in general, given the watermark. Vaticidalprophet 09:55, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Some Comments and Thoughts

Hello; Vaticidalprophet recently posted on my User Talk Page to ask if I would take a look at this article given my work on related topics elsewhere at Wikipedia. I'm not going to give a complete run-through, but I have some thoughts/comments that may prove useful to them (or others) working on this page.

• Some of the wording is a not quite in Wikipedia's neutral style; "99% of human history is set in the Paleolithic alone, "sparse evidence exists for ritual practice as early as Homo naledi", "the rich and complex body of art", "the elaborate cave art and enigmatic Venus figurines". This style is quite common when trying to engage the reader but necessitates a lot of value judgements and is not really ideal for Wikipedia. Keep things really neutral.
• I'd avoid "esoteric". Yes, it can mean hidden knowledge or something like that, but it also has a more specific meaning with reference to Western esotericism so its use here could prove misleading.
• "an Australopithecus faith" - faith has strong associations with Protestantism specifically (and orthodoxies, rather than orthopraxies, more generally), so perhaps a term to avoid here.
• "with many pagan faiths today" - it is typical to capitalise "Pagan" when talking about the new religions, and might be worth explicitly referring to them as "modern Pagan" to avoid confusion.
• I think that the biggest issue here, and one that is very difficult go get around, is the sheer scope covered. This is both temporal, in terms of covering everything from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age, but also geographical. The article tends to focus mostly on the "Old World", with very little on the Americas or Australasia. Sometimes this can result in something of a Eurocentric or at least Old World-focused bias in the coverage; "One famous feature of Neolithic religion were the stone circles of the British Isles, of which the best known today is Stonehenge" in the lead, for instance. Stone circles are fascinating - but they only exist (at least from this period) in one very small corner of the globe.
• I think that the article would need to acknowledge the difficulty coming to an agreed definition of "religion" among scholars, and how that has impacted archaeological interpretations of prehistoric belief and action. That could go in the "Background" section. Is "religion" a belief in supernatural entities? Or is it symbolic behaviour? Depending on which general definition is employed strongly, archaeological interpretations will vary and the reader needs to be aware of this.
• I'm not a big fan of the citation style used here, but it is nevertheless certainly permitted at Wikipedia. However, the lack of specific page numbers for some of the citations is a major issue and would definitely be a barrier to it becoming an FA.

Hopefully some of these points may prove of use. Well done on all the hard work put into this article so far. Midnightblueowl (talk) 12:14, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments! :) Will keep in mind as I work on this. The geographic scope is definitely an obstacle I've been working with; it's a very difficult balance, and it shines through a bit that I know more about Europe in the Paleolithic and East Asia in the Neolithic respectively than elsewhere. The point on the difficulty of defining religion is very valid and something I've been writing with in mind, but not always showing properly. I think all the cites do specify page numbers, although in some of those cases (significantly with Against the Grain) I'm unconvinced of the page numbers being accurate and am seeking another copy of the book to double-check. All in all, good comments, thank you. Vaticidalprophet 13:02, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, this is a minor thing, but by definition " 99% of human history" did not occur during "prehistory." Historical periods are intentionally separated from prehistorical, and while in a casual context the word "history" is often used to encompass the entire duration of a thing's existence, I don't think we should use it in that way in this article. LeperColony (talk) 21:26, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

An appreciation of the article as of October 2023

I don't know if this really is appropriate on this page, but I just wanted to say thank you for this article. As a "general reader" who was interested in the origins of religion, I found the current version of the article to be enlightening. The prose was well written and flowed easily. In particular, I liked the way the article presented divergent viewpoints among scholars. I see there is some discussion here about the credibility of the sources, and a few critical points as to the precision of the claims. I have no possibility to judge any of these criticisms. To me, this article embodied what Wikipedia should be all about. To be able to find such a thorough article that is accessible both in the style of writing and accessible as in free to access is a thing of wonder. Thank you to everyone who has contributed here. KaldeFakta68 (talk) 16:27, 24 October 2023 (UTC)