Hi, I am one of the coauthors of the paper. In a sense they were community bbq. We theorise that these were built by communities coming together(rather than just family groups). Cattle provide a lot of meat, based off previous studies, one could easily feed hundreds of people.
One thing that is fascinating is we haven't found the remains of the bbq yet. We have only ever found horns and upper cranial elements- never the body. Our new project is focusing on trying to work out where that ritual feasting would have taken place.

I moved from KC 30+ years ago, but at one time I worked just down the street from Rosedale BBQ. The smell was divine and the barbecue outstanding. I would try to eat there at least once a week if possible. Joe's wasn't around then, but it was always worth stopping at Gates and Sons. I sent a few folks there but forgot the warn them about the yelling. They were a but startled. Jack Stack is OK, but there are others that are better (IMHO). Zarda has the best burnt ends and their beans are loaded with pieces of outside cuts. Now you have me missing KC - you can't find burnt ends many other places.

Hi, I am one of the co-authors of the piece. Happy to answer any questions.

"Sharing is caring." People love sharing things of value - food, drink, flowers, songs, etc. - with friends, family and honoured guests. Only makes sense that the local gods are invited as well.

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The weather and the people. SoCal has a climate in which being broke and begging is tolerable, if you notice, many of the cults accentuate poverty as a lifestyle. The population is also a more receptive audience, much of the population moved there to live their life on their terms and experiments are common. This population also has the double whammy of not only being more receptive, but also unmoored from their community and it's an easy way to find friends. Many cult experts will tell you that not having access to strong family or friends support is a risk factor when dealing with cults.

I mean even the term "sacrifice" has been problematised for some of these reasons. As several people have pointed out, a lot of this stuff could probably better be described as large-scale feasts, to which entire communities were invited - including the gods, who were seen as potential allies, to be swayed with food and drink.

If I host a BBQ in my backyard, I might pay for the meat to be grilled, and in that sense I am in a sense "sacrificing" something - in that I am thereby giving up something of value - but calling the entire BBQ a "sacrifice" would nevertheless be quite wrong.

Scholars who study the idea of "sacrifice" are, these days, very aware of all of this and therefore tend to be quite careful indeed about how the term is used.

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> And I’m pretty sure most cultures didn’t consider blood a food or something to be eaten.

If you could list a few examples from the ancient world of cultures where cooking with blood was considered wrong or taboo, I'd love to see them.

> I wouldn’t mind seeing your source on the Gods enjoying it, though.

Sure thing!

In Billie Jean Collins' Pigs at the Gate: Hittite Pig Sacrifice in Its Eastern Mediterranean Context, she describes how in a rite from Kizzuwatna,

> "the petitioner digs a hole in the ground and kills a piglet […] so that its blood flows into the pit. Various offerings of grains and breads are placed into the pit and the primordial deities are invited to eat the food and drink the blood of the piglet."

Furthermore, in Gary Beckman's Blood in Hittite Ritual, he explains how

> "… The syntagm aulin karp- must indicate the positioning of the victim’s throat to receive the fatal slashing. After the blow had been struck, the officiant could control the direction taken by the resultant eruption of blood, sending it upward or downward. It is this distinction that is expressed by the pair of technical terms ‘slaughter up’ versus ‘slaughter down’…"

And he continues:

> "In this regard the Hittites seem to have observed a practice similar to that of the ancient Greeks by which animals offered to celestial and earthly gods were generally killed with their throats upward, while those intended for chthonic deities met their end with throats turned earthward."

Apparently none of these gods had a problem with being sprinkled with blood - quite the opposite!

As mentioned, Odysseus' sacrifice of the ram and the ewe is described in the Odyssey - the relevant passages are 10.504-540 and 11.13-50.

Oh and another example from the Greek world - in Pindar's Olympian 1, the deified Pelops is explicitly said to receive "blood-sacrifices" at his "much-frequented tomb."

Likewise, Menander Rhetor describes a happy birth thusly - "every relative and friend was full of hope; they sacrificed to the gods of birth, altars ran with blood, the whole household held holiday."

There are many, many more examples of altars being smeared with blood. Picking a few examples at random, you've got the Hyndluljóð, where the young king smears the sacrificial hǫrgr with ox blood - as does a princess in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, and an injured hero in Kormáks saga.

I mean I could go on and on, but yeah - there are plenty of examples.

https://sea-control.simplecast.com/episodes/sea-control-420-building-an-ancient-naval-ram-with-stephen-decasien

Looks like he explains it more here too.

If you don't give something up, it's not a sacrifice. Pouring whiskey on the grave of a deceased friend is a kind of sacrifice. Taking a drink in his honor is not.

If it was a sacrifice then no, it or at least parts of it were not eaten. If all the normal bits were eaten then it would be a feast in honor of x not a sacrifice to x. Note it's likely that a few high value but also symbolic parts were wasted rather than eaten. Lots of sacrifice is of the heart which is burnt (otherwise it's good vitamin rich food) or blood which soaks into the ground (rather than caught in bowls and made into foods like blood pudding)

But humans like to play games, lots of sacrifices were of bits like bones or hooves that had very little use. Or people would sacrifice a proxy, maybe make a little clay cow, and throw that in the fire

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I wonder who/when this religious sacrifice/blood-god idea started? Question that time immemorial has lost the answer to, perhaps?

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Community BBqs are a ritual according to anthropology.

I think he’s just pointing out how the traditions are rooted in logic for the time. Some were to prevent the spread of disease and others are explanations for why the gods got the bits we don’t want. And I’m pretty sure most cultures didn’t consider blood a food or something to be eaten. I wouldn’t mind seeing your source on the Gods enjoying it, though.

Sacrifices specifically performed by priests were not really the norm. They happened, they existed, but often those were for really big really important rituals where you need someone to ensure it's performed correctly. But even then the role of the priest was not much what the modern conception looks like. Ancient polytheistic religions weren't just "Christianity but with more sky daddies'. The priests role was to ensure orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.

The impetus for a sacrifice was far from always some rarefied churchy thing. If someone in your family was making a journey you might invoke some god to look on favor of whatever their goal was and see to their safe return, and propose to the god that if they do so you'd celebrate their return and success, and the god role in it by making a sacrifice to that god. And you might involve a priest in determining if the god agreed to those terms (determine portents was very much seen as a skill and if you ask the god for help and the portents say '"Don't do this" you'd want to put those plans off). But on their safe return you wouldn't just hand the animal off to a priest and wash your hands of the whole thing. The sacrifice would be part of your families celebration of their success and return. It's not the priests eating the food, it's you.

Even if you're not trying to ask for some specific thing, your local gods would be powerful members of your community. So as mentioned if you were celebrating something (Slaughtering an animal and the food that came from it would be cause enough to celebrate) you'd make sure any god who was relevant was included just on general principle. The animal grew well and strong, did not die to illness or wild animals, and now you and your household have a bounty of food. Clearly the gods looked in favor on that, and they'd deserve to be included in that celebration as much or more than any of the members of the household. Unless there was some specific agreement with the god to make a sacrifice, the sacrifice wouldn't be made out of obligation, but because not doing so would just be plain rude.

A lot of sacrifices wouldn't have been "Well we need to waste this animal as a sacrifice to keep a god happy, but a least the priests can eat it", but "We're slaughtering this animal for food to eat ourselves. So we're going to offer some relevant god an appropriate portion of that bounty as thanks." In a modern context, a community BBQ would be a wholly appropriate event to make some offerings, because it would not do to snub some of the most powerful and important figures of that community.

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> things that are considered taboo/unfit for human consumption (like blood)

To be clear, that is not a universal taboo.

As mentioned, the Spartans (as an example) used pig's blood for their famous "black soup" - surely they weren't alone in thinking of blood as potential food.

That is true.

I still wonder which specific 1st century BCE religions the person had in mind, though - would have loved to learn more!

The mud season in autumn and spring in Ukraine also has a big impact on the ability of the warring parties to launch offensives. While a network of hardened roads have made logistics much easier, cross-country assaults are still very much inhibited by the mud, keeping the attackers on the roads and thus much more vulnerable.

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To be fair to the person you are responding to, your examples are centuries earlier than the 1st century BCE they referred to