Arrghh... why can't archeologists ever just say "we don't know what this was used for" instead of claiming "ritual purposes" for everything they don't understand?

Ancient peoples were intensely practical, and most of the stuff they made had definite utility. As in this case. Glad someone took the time and trouble to understand what they were used for. I hope the idiots who speculated (with no evidence) that they were purely ornamental feel utterly ashamed of themselves.

Archeology should impose a rule that if a digger claims an object was made for "ritual purposes" then they should have to specify the ritual and the part that the object plays in it.

/rant

"Ritual" is jargon. Any archaeologist would understand that referring to something as "ritual" means "we can't explain what it is used for." It's unfortunate that the jargon is extremely easy to understand for non-practitioners, but that's not entirely unusual [1].

It should be noted that "ritual" doesn't exactly mean "we know nothing." It presupposes that there was a reason for something to exist, but often we don't have any insight into what that reason may be.

[1] The case that shows up in my work, writing compiler optimizations, is "global" which refers to optimizations that apply to the entire function as opposed to basic blocks or regions at a time.

Would it kill the profession to use "unknown purposes" instead of "ritual purposes"?

The rant comes from my years as a re-enactor, when we were trying to faithfully re-create historical finds and explain them to the public. "ritual purposes" was a huge problem.

I agree completely with marcus_holmes. If “ritual” is just jargon, it should be changed, because it’s also misleading. I can’t think of another example where a word means something precise, and also means less than nothing in the same context.

> Archeology should impose a rule that if a digger claims an object was made for "ritual purposes" then they should have to specify the ritual and the part that the object plays in it.

Sadly, this is a standard that we can't meet even when we know perfectly well that an object had a ritual purpose.

We know that there were many Greek mysteries involving rituals of all levels of significance. We know very little about what those rituals involved.

We have every reason to believe that the "six ritual jades" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_jade#Six_Ritual_and_Si... ) really did have ritual significance, even though the details are long lost. In that case, the idea that the objects had some mysterious significance was preserved into historical times, but we can't be confident that the significance as understood by the first-century Chinese was a good match with the significance understood by those who actually used the items.

Good point :)

But if a digger says that a find was used for agricultural purposes, they're expected to have a reasonable idea how it was used. This is not required for ritual items, and it really should be, because otherwise "ritual" becomes an easy opt-out.

Some of them look so much like axes. With a hole for the handle, even. But too small and delicate, I guess. Toys? Or ceremonial, I guess.