Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
Every morning, the first thing I do after getting up is go to the bathroom. That is a ritual. Watching the football game every week--ritual. Making your cup of coffee in the morning--ritual.
The disconnect is that most people understand "ritual" to have a religious or supernatural component, which none of the examples I've given have. Archaeologists do not understand "ritual" to need this component either. Also note that it is easier to identify the commonality of an object and its associated context than it is to identify what the object is and much, much easier than identifying why it is used.
In the context of the Mesoamerican ball game, there is abundant evidence that it is a 1200-year-old version of the NFL, although the biggest difference from modern sportsball is that the players seem to be poorly paid (if at all) from their teams and are more heavily reliant on their sponsorship income.
It doesn’t imply any religious purpose. Lots of what people do in life is composed of rituals. Morning coffee ritual, for example.
And a coffee maker is not for ritual use, it is for making coffee.
They very often do know what the object is used for. It just doesn't have any economic/survival significance. For example, children's toys are labelled ritual objects.
This sort bulk classification via jargon exists elsewhere in science. For example, astronomers refer to all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals. Should we ridicule astronomers for not knowing basic chemistry? Or should we accept that different fields have terms of art/jargon which are very useful for communicating among colleagues and are not intended to compete with the general usage of those words?
Nothing religious or spiritual (usually), but you get a lot of time/structure/cycle/morning/sleep/work semiology out of the coffee ritual. In fact, this is so true that coffee as a beverage has adopted significant phenomenological value external to its utility due to cultural osmosis - we have very strong associations between coffee and a variety of abstract qualities: work, awakeness, sleep deprivation, productivity, etc. And, these qualities are quite different between cultures even if the actual raw output/process of production are pretty much the same for many.
Making coffee is much more susceptible to this kind of ritualmaking because of the implicit repetition, sequence and waiting qualities of the process. That said, there are people who engage with the process without any ritual - the patient in the dentist's waiting room who pops in a K-cup, the McDonalds worker who fills the McCafe order off a ticket, the spouse who runs out of tea and puts on a cup of their partner's coffee.
Put yourself in the seat of someone coming to look at your house 1,000+ years after you died. Most things are gone but some things are intact. Our history and language was either wiped out or indiscernible. What would they find?
Well, in my house, here's a few things:
- they'd find that the softwood in my kitchen is much more worn than the rest of my house. We either spent a lot of time there or didn't care about it.
- they'd then find that there's bags of fragrant stuff by this steel machine with a pressurization cup that also has a steam wand.
- they'd find a water reservoir on the back of the machine.
- if I left in a hurry, they'd find cups scattered throughout the house, particularly in what looks like working areas.
- they'd find clean cups near the machine; some are plain but some are decorated!
Even from all this, they'd have to look at coffee beans to find out they're caffeinated, they'd need to determine the presence of sugar, spices, and the various types of milk humans use. The "morning coffee ritual" would still look pretty amalgamous, and lots of context as to what we did around it would be lost, but they'd get an idea around what it all was about.
Your own definition of "ritual".
I think that socratic contempt for religion used to be an absolute fringe. Only recently we can distinguish betwen scientific and unscientific. For eons, people, educated people, could only distinguish between traditional and weird.
That was their "knowledge" and they used what they had, because one needs to navigate their life somehow.
https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_20...
It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"