Religious Belief and Cooperation: A View from Ancient Greece

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of the Cognitive Science of Religion has proposed that the in-group cooperation needed for the development of the large, complex human societies that first appeared during the Holocene was fostered by belief in the existence of supernatural beings that monitor humans and punish misbehavior. Two competing hypotheses have been put forward in this context: the "Moralzing High Gods (MHG) Hypothesis" and the "Broad Supernatural Punishment (BSP) Hypothesis." The MHG Hypothesis contends that belief in one or more moralizing omniscient gods underpinned the development of complex societies, while the BSP Hypothesis proposes that it was fear of supernatural monitoring and punishment by non-MHG supernatural phenomena that fostered the development of socio-political complexity, and that MHGs followed rather than preceded the appearance of complex societies. Here, we report preliminary results of a study that is using textual and archaeological evidence for Ancient Greek religious beliefs and practices to test these hypotheses. Emulating a previous study that tested the hypotheses with Viking data (Raffield et al. (2019)), the study seeks to answer two questions: 1) did the Ancient Greeks perceive themselves subject to supernatural monitoring and punishment? And 2) were the Ancient Greeks' gods MHGs?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39844.0