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385 29 According to legend, the monstrous Minotaur—half-man, half-bull—made his home in the Labyrinth at Knossos on the Mediterranean island of Crete. The cave-like Labyrinth—large, dark, complex in layout, but homogeneous in appearance—was built by Daedulus for King Minos. To repay the Athenians for the slaying of his son, Minos exacted tribute of fourteen Athenian youths every nine years. This lasted until the Athenian hero, Theseus, decided to assume the role of one of the sacrificial youths, travel deep into the Labyrinth, and slay the Minotaur. But how was Theseus to find his way out of the confusing passages once the deed was done? The answer came from Ariadne, daughter of Minos. She gave Theseus a ball of string and the idea to unwind it as he traveled toward the monster. Theseus entered the Labyrinth, unwinding the string as he went along. After plunging his sword into the Minotaur,Theseusfollowedthestringsafelybackouttothe surface world. For her cleverness and willingness to betray her father for love, Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos during his homeward voyage. The story of the Labyrinth at Knossos suggests the power caves have had to capture the human imagination; they are places of fear, mystery, gloominess, weirdness, and wonder. The legend of the Minotaur and his home, the Labyrinth, has been exceptionally widespread and influential in many parts of the world, showing up in art, architecture , folklore, and symbolism in many cultures for thousands of years. The Minotaur himself is a concrete personification (terrification?) of the essence of dread and strangeness induced by the cave. The psychological power of caves is reflected in many other stories and symbols besides the Minotaur, such as the attitude many people in many cultures have had about the bat as denizen of the underworld or just “bat out of hell” (Lawrence 1993). It can hardly be accidental that dark zones of caves have so often been important sacred or mythological spaces in the ritual and ideological lives of humans. The chapters in this volume have all documented and described the roles that caves have played in the past and continue to play today among diverse human groups in terms of symbolism, cosmology, myth, and ritual. Traditions of ritual cave use have originated at different times in widely separated geographic areas and may be traced back to the earliest modern humans. The long temporal spans and deep antiquity witnessed in the archaeological record allows us to appreciate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon over time and space. The pattern argues against a solitary model of cultural diffusion and points toward the independent development of similar conceptual formulations of caves. What could explain independently occurring cave constructs? In this chapter we address how places dynamically arise as meaningful locations by exploring the case of ritual cave use as a cross-cultural phenomenon. The phenomenological approach detailed by Alfred Schutz (1967) and Why Dark Zones Are Sacred TurningtoBehavioralandCognitiveScienceforAnswers Daniel R. Montello and Holley Moyes Daniel R. Montello and Holley Moyes 386 lends these spaces to mythic constructions and ritual use. In the case of long cultural traditions of ritual cave use such as those found in Paleolithic Europe (Clottes, chapter 1, this volume), the ancient and modern Americas (chapters 10, 11, 12, this volume), or Neolithic and Bronze Age Greece (Tomkins, chapter 4, this volume), similar perceptual -environmental interactions would be expected to reinforce conceptual formulations and facilitate cultural transmission by providing a relatively fixed environmental referent in the form of stable geographic features. Several authors have suggested that caves also provided the referents for later ritual architecture (see this volume, Moyes and Brady, chapter 10; Skeates, chapter 2; Smith, chapter 7; Stoddart and Malone, chapter 3; and Yorke and Ilan, chapter 6), thus reinforcing the environmental stimulus in the built environment. Our stance requires that we reject Cartesian notions of mind–body duality in favor of modern theories of embodied knowledge such as experiential realism. This theory of the mind developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) is a philosophical stance that asserts that mental models of the world come from one’s experience with it. Even though the mind cannot experience the world “directly,” the indirect experiences of the world are shaped in consistent ways by its physical nature, by the physical nature of our individual senses, and by the physical nature ofourownbodiesandhowtheyinteractphysicallywiththe world. More recently, Vittorio Gallese (2005) has joined Lakoff in further developing this theory by reviewing evidence from neuroscience...

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