Water and Cosmology in the Stone Age of Northeastern Europe

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7663000
AutoresKerkko Nordqvist (0000-0001-8696-1707), P Herva (0000-0002-5925-4406), Sandell (0000-0002-6111-3362)
Año2019
Volumen47
Número1
Páginas23-32
Fecha de publicación2019-03-28
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaArchaeology Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1563-0110 • E-ISSN: 1531-832X
EditorialInstitute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.17746/1563-0110.2019.47.1.023-032
OpenAlexW2924433209
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas15

This paper explores water and watery places as sacred elements among the cultures of the northern boreal zone during the Stone Age, and especially the Neolithic period, through materials deriving from Northwestern Russia and Fennoscandia. The peculiarity and importance of water and certain watery environments, like rivers, lakes, bogs, waterfalls, and rapids, are discussed through depositional practices of material culture, mainly lithic artifacts. Rock-art provides further tools for approaching the topic, not only through its locations in the landscape but also through its motifs, which allow parallels to be drawn to later ethnographical sources and folklore, too. Finally, the paper briefl y touches upon the rationality behind making a strict separation between “sacred” and “mundane” when interpreting prehistoric cultural phenomena. Water was integral to human life in many different ways, but bodies of water and watery places could also be threatening and unpredictable. Therefore water would have been an ambivalent element, probably invested with signifi cant cultural meanings in the Stone Age world

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Animism · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Folklore · Geography · Parallels · Period (music · Prehistory · Rationality · Sociology · Stone Age · Anthropology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Psychology · History · Philosophy