Doctrines of Neolithic Religiosity

Abstract

As a prehistoric archaeologist working on the Neolithic of southwest Asia, I focus on Harvey Whitehouse’s evolutionary theory of the emergence of the doctrinal mode of religiosity in the context of the emergence of “agricultural intensity” and “social inequality” in the Neolithic period, and quite specifically in the latest phase of the occupation of the settlement of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. I find those difficult phrases ill-defined in the book, and in the author’s published papers on which the book depends. And I contend that the evidence for intensive agricultural production and of institutionalized social inequality is to be found post-Neolithic and associated with the emergence of the first urban societies. I believe that Whitehouse’s idea of the emergence of doctrinal religiosity needs to be argued in the context of the earliest (literate) civilizations of southern Mesopotamia and Egypt.