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I may be sticking my head in the oven here but to deny the probability that many (not necessarily all) of the varied monuments had some religious/ritual/spiritual function or purpose would seem to me to be wilfully obtuse regardless of whether or not one is religious oneself or completely atheistic. I think I'm right in saying that the earliest monuments were associated with death/burial (I use that term loosely) and then I think of Christopher Hitchens' point that humankind will only forego religion entirely when it sheds its fear of death; put the two together and you can see how a reverence of dying and the dead, with the associated construction of impressive monuments, leads into a belief-system which requires similar structures to be built to give it substance/authority, what you will. I know archaeologists always get defensive about ascribing 'ritual' as a function for a monument but it seems a more-than-reasonable conjecture; whether in the case of the big ones their builders/guardians were wholly benign or fanatical/authoritarian is something we'll just never know. Known history suggests the bigger, the more dogmatic.
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