No, this is not what Lynne Kelly is saying.
My summary:
- Many indigenous cultures preserve surprisingly large amounts of knowledge, despite having no written language:
- The characteristics, and medicinal, food, and other uses of many hundreds of different species of plants and trees. (e.g the Hanunóo in the Philippines in the 19th century could name, describe, and explain 1,625 plant species.)
- Hundreds of animal and marine species ditto, their defining chatracteristics, habitats, behaviour, life-cycles, hunting techniques, uses, etc.
- Similarly the characteristics of insects. (e.g. North American Navajo have worked with ethnoentomologists to classify and describe over 700 species of insects.)
- Medical knowledge of how to diagnose and treat numerous different illnesses and types of wounds.
- Navigation and ‘maps’ to numerous locations, often over distances of hundreds or even thousands of miles.
- Knowledge of currents, tides, and winds for cultures connected with sea.
- History of tribes, often covering many centuries.
- Treaties, agreements, borders with other tribes.
- Detailed genealogies and family trees, often going back several centuries.
- Stars and constellations (used for directional purposes as well as to tell time of night), lunar and solar cycles, seasonal variations.
- Dates and places of regular large gatherings.
- Notable historical natural events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, comets.
- What to do in rare events, such as serious droughts and floods that occur once in several generations, when normal food sources are not available.
- Etc, etc.
- All this knowledge is preserved by the use of memory techniques, which involve, but are not limited to:
- Totem poles, memory boards, small shaped stone, wood, or leather objects of various kinds.
- Abstract or representative paintings and designs.
- Knotted chords.
- Landscape features in ‘sacred’ spots, and ‘ritual’ journeys through a number of such landscape features.
And particularly:
- Songs.
- Dances.
- Mnemonic stories.
- All of these may be used in combination or separately.
e.g.
Lynne Kelly gives a large number of such examples, with citations to published papers.
4. In many cultures this body of knowledge is so large that it takes years of dedicated effort to learn. This results in a special caste of people whose function it is to preserve the knowledge, while most people only memorise a smaller amount of everyday knowledge.
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It is a category mistake to think that the primary function of songs, dances, rituals, ritual objects and places, and the ‘priestly’ caste is religion and worship. A small part of it may indeed be religion and worship, but the great bulk of it is about preserving detailed knowledge and facts.
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It is not a big leap to connect, say, the stone posts at Gobekli Tepe, with North American totem poles and other such objects in other cultures, and guess that they may have served a similar purpose.
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Usually regular gatherings are held, which in Australia may involve thousands of people, to refresh and remember the songs, dances, etc. which encode the knowledge of the culture. These gatherings are held at places where knowledge is encoded in features of the landscape.
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We can theorise that larger, more settled and sophisticated cultures may have created purpose-built ‘landscape objects’ such as stone circles and places like Gobekli Tepe for such gatherings.