Watch physical evidence of cannibalism be definitively explained as religious funerary ritual rather than left as “possible evidence of cannibalism”. Watch defensive structures like gatehouses on hill forts explained away as “religious processional structures”, like iron age subsistence farmers had the time and resources for frivolous construction.

For real fun, when people speak of the Roman barbarity and blood lust of the Games, ask how much actual blood and gore you would actually see from the cheap seats compared to what you can see realistic and close up on the average big screen horror movie.

As Kirk says, the past is a different country. In colonial times, racism was taken for granted and was “scientific”, and all right-thinking people thought so, and more importantly, so did most of the subjugated.

We cannot conceive today of the mentality of those who would condemn their neighbours to death for witchcraft, because to us, witchcraft is just a benign semi-religion that some new-agers practice, not an existential threat, but to our ancestors it was a real thing, and in many parts of the world it is STILL a real thing, which we have an equally hard time getting our head around.

In the part of South Africa where I grew up, belief in witchcraft was pretty much universal. One poor guy doing survey work for a new dam was set upon by a mob and burned to death for witchcraft because he was hammering metal stakes into the ground. That was how wizards summon lightning (a popular way wizards killed people in the area).

Also “everyone” knew that drowning was the result of witchcraft. After all, you drank water all the time bathed and swam in water and nothing bad happened, water is harmless, unless you have been bewitched.

I love how modern hopes and expectations are projected onto the past. Yes, there possibly was such a thing as a Viking Shield Maiden, but to be celebrated and mentioned in the way it(allegedly)was, it would have had to be extremely rare, like Joan-of-Arc rare.

We have ONE burial, based on grave goods alone, no archer’s or swordsman’s deformities on the bones, and suddenly, hey presto! Proof of female warriors AND modern style equality of the sexes in ancient Europe. Confirmation bias writ HUGE!

The construct “racism” isn’t really valid, going back to those times. The theory had yet to be articulated, and since it was based mostly on the ideas of Darwin (racial superiority, I mean…), the Romans would have lacked that mindset entirely. Which is not to say that they didn’t have other, equivalent ones that were just as bad…

The past is another country, and they do things differently there. Even being immediately descended from those who were resident and taking part in those times is no guarantee you’re going to understand or be able to figure out what the hell they were thinking. Were my grandparents racist? I really don’t know how to answer that question–They certainly disapproved of things like the KKK, were for civil rights, but I suspect that had my mother taken up with a black man, that would have been a totally unacceptable thing, unthinkable. So… Does that make them racists? How do you evaluate that?

And, you want to tell me you can project back a thousand generations and discern the outlines of religious belief? LOL… Yeah. Bullshit. State the raw facts, and leave interpretation for the authors of fiction, because what you’re producing with this BS is only one step away from being a candidate for the next Dragon award.

But, the academics will spawn thesis after thesis until they’ve cut down entire forests, filled with supposition and theory, precisely none of which can be verified.

It’s like that supposed “Viking Warrior Maiden” thing recently–All you can really say is that we think a woman was buried in a grave with typical male grave goods of a supposed warrior. They have no skeletal features that support the idea that she was a weapons-wielder, or a soldier, but the fact that she was in a grave with a sword and a board game make everyone swoon at her elite warrior status.

Alternative explanations? Like maybe, she was buried with her husband’s gear, after he was lost at sea? Or, that she was a sacrificial place-holder for someone killed during a far-off campaign? There’s all sorts of possibilities, but the odds that the Norse were so stupid as to have their women taking up arms for actual warfare in an era where muscle and mass powered everything military? LOL… Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on. Brienne of Tarth is a friggin’ fantasy character. I’m sure that women took up arms to defend their homes and other things, but the idea that you’d be taking along a significant detriment on a long-range raid like the Vikings did…? Yeah; no. Just… No.

BTW The linked website is insane, politically.

It’s not the only such discipline not unworkable, but still.

Of course, to propitiate the Gods of the Academy, I will incant that there was never any war or genocide in prehistory. All just cultural transmission.

The named, elaborate pantheons of settled or settling people’s weren’t always mainly or primarily about morals either- but about rituals to ensure patronage of oneself or the tribe or city or kingdom or empire. Or to propitiate them against destruction, or ensure they maintain celestial mechanics. Whether Greece or Rome or Mexico, morals and ethics as we understand them from monotheism or secular philosophy weren’t usually job one. Not absent, perhaps, but still. The Egyptians, perhaps oddly, an early exception.

My god is the eternal sky. Your gods live under him.

- Subotai; thief and archer; Hyborian Age

Given that we have Gobekli Tepi and who knows what else out there that remains undiscovered, I’d be hesitant to start even trying to talk about this, except in terms like “Well, from what we can guess…”, because they still haven’t come up with a decent explanation for the how and why of Gobekli Tepi’s existence, let alone the multi-generational project that buried the damn place. All before the advent of even agriculture, not just “big civilization”.

I don’t think we know as much as we think we do, and I am really suspicious of anything coming out of the academy, these days–Especially on the issue of religion, which the academy’s “conventional wisdom” seems mostly interested in terms of disparagement and refutation.

There’s probably something to all this, but absent a time machine that works, I’m really not seeing it come to much of anything besides a bunch of navel-gazing papers and academic controversy. Precisely none of this crap can be proven, because we simply don’t know what the hell was going on. No records, see? And, since thoughts don’t fossilize that well…? You can’t prove a damn thing, one way or the other.