Aztec Blood Rituals
Over at Archaeology News, Jasmyne Pendragon (gotta love that name!) has posted the first and second installments of a three part series on “The Purpose of Aztec Blood Rituals.” Helpfully, the articles...
View ArticleSoul-less Corpses & Cannibalism
Over at Slate, the evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering — who has published numerous scholarly articles on afterlife/soul beliefs and perceptions of supernatural agency, explains why cannibalism may...
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Ritual Skull Caps
A recent article by Bello and colleagues, published in PLoS One (open access), has generated much attention in the press and blogosphere. The authors report on the earliest directly dated human skull...
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Human Head Soup in Upper Paleolithic
Head cheese may not be for everyone but it has an intensely devoted following. Most head cheese recipes call for the removal of brain, eyes, and ears before preparation, but purists scoff at this and...
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Eating Bodies & Drinking Spirits
For historians and theorists of religion, one of the more useful exercises is to compare and contrast the religions of indigenous peoples whose economies or “bases” were different. We are fortunate to...
View ArticleRational Human Sacrifice
Is there a “rational” explanation for human sacrifice? Of course there is; indeed, there are several, depending on which premises are used to construct the culturally relative concept of what counts as...
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