You Didn’t Have To Be There: Evidence of Humour in the Creation and Use of Material Objects From the Near East, Eastern Europe and Mediterranean, From the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age

When Malinowski said, “Anthropology is the science of the sense of humour” in 1966, the theories of the study of humour itself were still being developed, and yet he so clearly summarises why it is important to find our shared funny bones. Through humour we gain sympathetic understandings with each other in a way that goes beyond words; indeed humour may have preceded language in our evolutionary development and has been seen in primates. Such longevity of humour suggests it would have been found in pre-literate societies, such as in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern; areas where the marrying of two incongruous ideas can be found in ancient examples of ritual and/or art objects, a thought process facilitated by humour and perhaps even motivated by it. Therefore in this dissertation I seek to identify ancient examples of humour which I will explain and interpret using such theories as 'Benign Violation’ by McGraw & Warren (2010) and Apter’s ‘Reversal Theory’ from 1982. My aim is to explain why objects could have been funny and may have acted as powerful social tools, catering to our strong psychological drive to laugh. Drawing upon a number of interactive clay objects from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in the East Mediterranean I aim to demonstrate that these objects are perhaps the earliest tangible evidence we have for ‘jokes’.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

mres

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Bull, Elizabeth A.

• CB Hanes gwareiddiad
• CC Archaeoleg
• D051 Hanes yr Henfyd
• DE Rhanbarth Môr y Canoldir. Y Byd Groeg-Rufeinig
• DR Gorynys y Balcanau
• GN Anthropoleg

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

UWTSD

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.uwtsd.ac.uk:3905