Changes of Ritual Practices in Neolithic Levant

Changes of Ritual Practices in Neolithic Levant Throughout Mesopotamian history humans found ways of relating to the world through the environment and supernatural entities. When we study the relationship Mesopotamians had with their world, we see a symbolic system of communication that developed from ideology and belief systems. These symbolic systems of communication can be called “rituals”, which were created differently in different areas and time periods, and which were always changing. As defined by Firth (1951), ritual is “a kind of patterned activity oriented towards the control of human affairs, primarily symbolic in character with a non-empirical referent, and as a rule socially sanctioned” (p. 222). Using archeological evidence from the Levantine Neolithic period to study rituals, we see an introduction of new ritual practices and their function in community management. In the Levant, ritual practices and their significance changed many times during the Neolithic, but using evidence retrieved from sites inhabited throughout this period we can identify patterns of ritual activity corresponding with specific time periods, and we can see how ritual practices were used to regulate social behaviors. Ritual has had many roles in Levantine Neolithic societies. Ritual activities included mortuary practices, production and use of figurines, communal production, and communal organization. The role that ritual plays in each of these cases is to unite and organize the community through cohesive practices. Communal actions provided bases for establishing social regulation. The practices surrounding death created a system of social hierarchy through the use primary and secondary burials, the location of burials, and the treatment of skeletons. There are three burial ‘styles’ which represent status. The first is subfloor and courtyard burials with decapitation, which indicates a high hierarchical status because of the amount of work it would have taken