I’ve been reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. In this book, in some of her other books (History of God and her writings on Fundamentalism [which she describes as a very modern concept {which I agree with to a certain degree but not entirely}]) and in the writings she cites she portrays the earliest, or Axial, religions- those that preceded Zoroastrianism and monotheism, as mostly doctrine-free myths and rituals that the practitioners probably did not accept the fundamental truth of; they believed that the rituals would court the favor of the gods, but not necessarily that this god was born of a sea serpent or that one of a sacrificed virgin or whatever. She believes that early humans understood that myths were largely an interface or an analogy with which to make sense of chaos, and that while they believed in the power of deities they did not really care so much about the details and would not have fought anybody over a dispute about the divinity of a particular creature or the ancestry of a certain goddess. It’s not a paradise or overly romanticized existence she describes, but it does seem in some ways more sophisticated than its descendant religions, when people did get worked up over the minutiae of the beliefs or the myths, and she portrays this not theoretically but more or less as fact.
Question: How do we know about the intellectual components of pre-literate belief systems? For the pre Zoroastrian Aryans, for instance (who are treated heavily in Armstrong), I can understand how we know some about them through archaeology and some through the Avestas written centuries later and perhaps a tad from primary written sources by contemporaries with literacy, but not really enough to flesh out more than the bare bones of their belief systems. Does anybody know why Armstrong makes these claims or on what such theories about primitive religions [and the non-fundamentalism of] are based?