Religious behavior can be traced back far into our hunter-gatherer past. Symbolically interpreting the natural world as resulting from the motivations of spirits, ghosts, or deities seems to have allowed early humans to conceptualize nature as a series of forces external to our own, letting us engage in speculation and negotiation with our ever-changing environment.
Yet religious expression has varied much throughout history, suggesting that the role of religion might have changed in larger, more sedentary societies. To explore this idea, a colleague and I reconstructed the organization of religious institutions in three very different pre-Columbian societies and found a wide range of variation in the role religion played. In the pre-Columbian societies of the Upper Terraba, it emphasized rituals that brought people of different villages together occasionally to help dispersed kin members maintain social bonds. In the Pueblos of the US Southwest, it helped keep small family groups distinct from one another within large towns, ensuring social order by using the natural hierarchy intrinsic to every family. And in the Maya societies of the Terminal Classis, religious institutions seems to have encouraged people of different villages to cooperate with one another through large, supra-kin congregations and the explicit fear of godly punishment. These differences highlight how our cultural instituions can take advantage of our innate cognitive tendencies to understand the world symbolically in very different ways depending on the needs of each society.
Results from these analyses have been published in MartÃn and Sol (2021), which is fully cited in the Publications and Presentations section of this portal.
This research was possible thanks to a Center for Latin American Studies (University of Pittsburgh) Faculty Research Grant, which includes funding from the U.S. Department of Education.