Stop calling every buried pile of rocks a 'ritual site'

I've seen three different posts this week alone about Iron Age roundhouses being labeled as ceremonial spaces just because they found a few animal bones or a pottery shard near the entrance. I spent 6 years working on a dig outside Bath, UK, and our team proved a 'shrine' was just a grain storage pit with a broken quern in it. People jump to the coolest explanation without checking the stratigraphy or asking if the bones show butchery marks, not offering marks. Why do we keep romanticizing the mundane, and has anyone else run into this on their own sites?

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marybutler1mo ago

The label problem starts way before the dig even happens, in my view. Once a site gets called a ritual site in the permit or the press release, nobody on the team wants to walk that back, because ritual sites get funding and roundhouses don't. Your team was lucky you could prove the grain pit thing. Most digs just quietly leave the label on and move on.

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