ANTHROP 2RP3 Lecture 1: ANTHROP 2RP3

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTHROP 2RP3
• Professor: Andy Roddick

Document Summary

Time magazine (is god dead?) scientific views taking over. Religion is becoming less social (more personalized) Radical change in public and social scientists account for religion. The inca capacocha ritual: child sacrifice in south america (sacrifice of young children for religious purposes on mountain top peaks: allowing them to preserve very well) Franz boas: diversity of human culture and the four fields cultural, linguistic, biological, archaeology. Physical traces of human actions in the world (to understand ritual and religious practices) Patterning: cultural behavior (small and large scale) Archaeologists reconstruct these patterns to tell (empirically constrained) stories o the past. Sites with no written records (diachronic: across time and at a macro scale, long periods vs synchronic, micro scale) A static timeless past? (can inform us of the future) Ladder of inference (rungs that allow us to access information of the past, lower ones are easier to access and the higher ones are out of reach and might not get to)