How caves showed me the connection between darkness and imagination

Holley Moyes |  Nov 2016

2024년 3월 21일 shadowing 완료

 

 

 

 

 

 

TED Talker/연자

Holley Moyes

Professor of Archaeology from the University of California

Darkness, it does something to us. When you walk into a dark room what's the first thing you want to do. Turn on the lights. So, okay, be honest. So, for all of you when you were children how many of you were afraid the dark or have children that were afraid of the dark? I was, yeah. There were monsters; there were monsters in every dark place under my bed, in the closet, but you know that was a long time ago and now we have sophisticated technology to help deal with that.

 

Or you know we can use night lights. We can turn the lights on in those dark spaces and in fact that is what people have been doing since before we were modern humans. So, this is a picture of an archeological excavation and Wonderwerk cave in South Africa and here archaeologists have found perhaps the first use of control fire by our hominid ancestors, Homo erectus. So, they were lighting up this dark cave 1.5 million years ago which means that we have been sitting around fires dispelling darkness, well, forever. So how did I get interested in darkness? Well, there's a one-word answer: Caves. I love caves. I always wanted to go to caves and my parents wouldn't take me. So, when I was a little girl I drew pictures of caves. So, when I grew up and became an archaeologist I showed everybody what did I decide to study: Caves. yeah

 

So, this is a photograph from my first field project. This is a cave in Belize in Central America called Actun Tunichil Muknal, which means cave of the Crystal Sepulcher and this cave was an ancient Mayan ritual cave site that was 
used from about 7 to 900 AD and I worked here with the Western Belize regional cave project starting about 1996. But, I've worked in ancient Maya ritual caves ever since then. Now, why would I can,  would make my whole career right based on ritual cave sites of the ancient Maya? Well, for one thing these caves contain thousands of artifacts that need to be recorded and not only this but they are disappearing at such a rapid rate from looting and also from vandalism and so the only way to really protect these sites is to record them. So, I have spent my life doing just this because these caves were sacred places for the ancient  Maya people and they deserve to be preserved. They deserve this because for the ancient Maya, these caves were so special in their mythology. They were considered to be entrances to the underworld.

Now, the underworld was sort of an ambiguous place so different things could come from the underworld: good  things and bad things. So, there were deities that lived in the underworld. There were good deities such as Chacc , the rain god, who sent clouds out of caves to rain on the crops and create agricultural fertility or there were the evil lords of the underworld who sent death and disease and destruction of war to the ancient Maya people. so these spaces were a very good place to go and leave offerings for these deities. Just in case you think that this was a thing of the past, well it's not. Because even today, ancient Maya people still use these caves and here's an image from Naj Tunich cave in Guatemala of some traditional Maya people doing a ritual not very long ago, asking for agricultural fertility and success.

 

So, what do I mean exactly when I talk about the word cave? what's a cave? We have different ideas about caves , but in my research I have to differentiate between caves and rock shelters because we do different things in these 
different spaces based on the quality of life. So, in rock shelters they're nice and light and they have Twilight areas and you can live in them and people even sometimes build little cities inside them. But, deep dark caves, the kind that I call caves, are actually had dark zones. Now, in the dark zone that's a whole different thing.  Dark zones are not really very good places to live and in fact most people through time and space have used these as ritual spaces so for instance, the Neanderthals they lived in the rock shelter part of a cave but they buried their dead in the dark zones. This is an image from the Paleolithic cave in France called Chauvet. This is perhaps  one of the earliest cave paintings in the world and this was placed deep in the dark zone of the cave and they weren't living back there and in fact in the Neolithic period, cave use really expanded when people begin to settle down and we started up seeing a lot of ritual cave use, leaving artifacts and offerings in caves and also using them for *** and cemeteries and all kinds of things and this goes on and on and on. I could give you hundreds of examples of ritual cave use over time.

 

And so even today when we think about it a lot of the great world religions have pilgrimage to caves. We still consider cave sacred. These are very elaborate, thousands of people go there people sometimes die going to these pilgrimages to these ritual, very important sacred sites to the point that the pattern is so pervasive that I would argue that there's no such thing as the cave man. I know everybody's disappointed about that, but the cave man is a myth the cave man is something that gets started by archaeologists in the mid-1800s and has been perpetuated by popular culture. So, if we begin to really understand how these dark zones of caves are used, you 
have to ask what caves? what is it that draws us into the cave? So, let's start to think about like what is the experience of a cave? Have you ever been in a cave? oh good great well you were like this. So, when you go in a cave you usually go into the earth or you go down right so that in itself is interesting and when you get there what do you see? it doesn't look anything like the surface right? So, caves, you've got stalactites and stalagmites
and all these weird-looking formations. You can't really see very far there are three dimensional spaces sometimes you have to crawl around to get from one place to another there. What we refer to as illegible, they're difficult to understand and to navigate but aside from that, what's the first thing you think about when you think about cave?

 

Darkness. Right? So, they're dark and they're full of shadows so when I think about ritual cave use I began to question: well, what could darkness have to do with this? This is probably the number one thing we think of when we think of caves. So, could darkness have something to do with this pattern of ritual usage over time and space? So that got me interested in sensory deprivation. This is that we're done in the mid 1900s right? So, these were done at major universities in the US and Canada to try to understand what happens when you cut off your senses. So, what researchers did was they would occlude someone's eye sights, either totally or with little ping-pong balls,  so that you could only see shadows, right? But, you couldn't see figures or images; sometimes they would cover their ears; they would sometimes cover their hands so they couldn't feel anything and then John Lilly invented the flotation tank so people could also experience like an antigravity type experience and what did these researchers find?

 

Well, first of all that there's a lot of individual difference people experience this differently but the one thing they could all agree on was that when you occlude someone's eyesight for a long enough period of time anywhere from 15 minutes to a day to maybe a month right? They begin to hallucinate and what do they see well they tend to see geometric patterns that tend to vibrate and by the way this image is not actually vibrating, it's you. But, they also noticed some other things as well and that is that there was differences in feelings and John Lilly actually began to suggest that there was also ways in differences, in the way people think the way people think and I thought well you know this is kind of interesting. I'd like to know more about this. I would like to know whether it's total sensory deprivation that causes this or could low-light conditions such as what we might experience if we're walking through a cave with a torch or a flashlight or maybe even a little candle. Could that change the way we think?

 

So, I partnered with some cognitive scientists and we decided to do a little experiment. So, in our experiment the first thing we did is that they wrote a survey and our survey was kind of interest. Because it gave little scenarios right, so we have no questions and in these scenarios they could have different kind of ambiguous answers but the one thing that they force people to do was to try to explain the unexplainable. So, this is an example of one of our questions: imagine your grandpa passed away one year ago today and on the day of his death you wake up to the scent of his cigar smoke. No one in the house smokes and the scent is very unique. Would you be more inclined to think and we gave them four choices: a. it was just a coincidence b. you're just hallucinating c. God may be letting you know he's alright or d. it may possibly be a sign from the spirit. Now notice in the first two answers this would require something that we're calling kind of rational scientific thinking: explain it away as an everyday occurrence. However the second two answers are what we call imaginary thinking so for imaginary thinking you have to invoke some sort of a deity or a supernatural force in order to explain the unexplainable. Now, this is something this imaginary thinking is something that anthropologist Maurice Block calls the transcendental imaginary and so for Block, this is what separates humans from other species. It's our ability to live in our imaginations and he gives for example human roles so things like a mother father uncle audience speaker president these rules are categories and we understand them. We know that there's certain things that go with these roles right? Certain kinds of behaviors that go with them but this is all essentially in our heads. They don't actually exist. There are things we all agree upon and so this transcendent imaginary is what makes us human.

 

So, back to our experiment. We had 104 students volunteered and we divided them into two groups of 52 and we set the first group in a very lovely, a well-lit room with a picture window and the second group we put into a dark 
room with only a little tiny light so that they could see to do the survey and we were somewhat surprised by our 
findings. We found that in the light room, people were tended to choose more rational or you know scientific kind of 
explanations but in the dark room people were more inclined to use their imaginary thinking and chose C and D and not only this but about 11% more in the dark room chose this answer and when we actually did the statistics on it it was statistically significant. So, I know this is only one small study and it's but, it prompted us to do a lot more research on that and we have ongoing research right now but in 2014 there was an anthropological study that helped to corroborate our findings so Polly Wiesner an anthropologist who studies the Kalahari Bushmen in Africa had been writing down conversations for about 20 years and she had all this really wonderful contextual data about the conversations and she knew whether they took place in the day or at night and what did she find? During the day people wanted to talk about ordinary things, where are they gonna go what are they gonna do what are they gonna eat things like this, but at night it was totally different: sitting around the fire what did they do? They sang they danced and 80% of the time they told stories. So, there were the Kalahari Bushmen sitting around their fire living in their imaginary thinking at night in the dark what does all this mean? What's out there about this? 

Well, it's not out there it's in there. When we take the archaeological record, ethnographic studies, research done in different universities and my own little study what it suggests is that our environment plays a very important part and not only how we feel how we think but also how we interpret our world in terms of ritual cave use and remembering the caves are some of the darkest places on earth. They have perpetual darkness. It suggests that they were not passive players but active agents in the development and maintenance of spiritual ideas although we avoid darkness. It makes us uncomfortable it frightens us. We also seek it out very specific reasons because darkness frees our minds from the constant barrage of sensory data, that demands our attention every minute of every day. Darkness allows us to recreate our world to think about ourselves in a different way, maybe even create something new. Darkness allows us to transcend the ordinary and perhaps to find the divine within ourselves.

 

 

Words&phrases/어휘공부

• Hominid :  a member of the family Hominidae, the great apes: orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans
• loot : steal goods from (a place), typically during a war or riot. desperate residents looted shops for food and water
• vandalism :  the crime of intentionally damaging property belonging to other people
• Paleolithic  : = Old Stone Age
• Neolithic :  final stage of cultural evolution or technological development among prehistoric humans
• pervasive : present or noticeable in every part of a thing or place The influence of Freud is pervasive in her books.
• illegible : impossible or almost impossible to read because of being very untidy or not clear. His writing is almost illegible. 
• flotation : the action of floating
• occlude : to block something Veins can get occluded by blood clots.
• cooroborate : confirm or give support to (a statement, theory, or finding). the witness had corroborated the boy's account of the attack