There seems to be a category of "archaeologist" that likes to explain artifacts they don't understand as being ceremonial or religious, because they can't think of any other explanation, and without having any information about what the ceremony is, or how the religion is supposed to work.
I take such claims to mean simply "We have no idea what this artifact is for; it might as well be something magical, for all we know".
You may enjoy Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay which pokes fun at what you’ve mentioned.
>”It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber.
Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.”
I guess you are in some category yourself because you seemingly haven't read the large amount of literature about a global shamanistic culture, and archaeologically there is plenty of evidence that divination came before games.
Its natural, because games based on chance give us the feeling of being "hot" or "cold" ie able or unable to predict entropy.
MMI is a burgeoning science but if you're curious there is a group out there with access to QRNGs that practice influencing probabilities. And there is a small, but measurable effect size. And even not so small in some experiments I have personally seen, but being funded by Rockefellers means keeping your nose pointed away from the control grid.
I don't have a primary source, but have seen articles similar to these links that mentions the toy to religious object classification overlap (with almost the same pull quote):
Well I'm pretty sure they have some evidence to support that claim, especially considering they can directly link the word to the meaning "count". Do you always just assume science is wrong?
> Well I'm pretty sure they have some evidence to support that claim [...]
> article: To this day, it is unknown how the Incas worked with these calculators. There are several hypotheses about their use [...]
It appears, that there are people who have formed hypotheses, but apparently no consensus...
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> article: The mysterious tablets were apparently suitable for all four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Many objects are suitable for numeric calculation (technically any object), just looking around my room I see a cupcake pan and a chess board -- the chess board being a little more useful for doing 8-bit binary arithmetic, but if I combine it with the cupcake pan I can add a dedicated shift register which makes mult/div a bit easier :)
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Your continued quote from above:
> [...] especially considering they can directly link the word to the meaning "count".
Yes, because as we all know - words in any given language only have a single meaning! 8P
> Do you always just assume science is wrong?
Last time I checked; jumping to a conclusion using a minimum of evidence isn't scientific.
Did you read the cited articles or are you basing your assertions only on this Web article? There might be a lot of detail on the evidence in the cited articles which are just not mentioned here.
It's somewhat ironic that you throw around a speculation that everything is speculated without actually trying to look at the possible evidence yourself.
> Did you read the cited articles or are you basing your assertions only on this Web article?
I did not read any of the cited articles!
> There might be a lot of detail on the evidence in the cited articles which are just not mentioned here.
I'm sure there is, but the linked article gave me no impetuous to read them; nor any guidance as to the most efficient order of consumption.
> It's somewhat ironic that you throw around a speculation that everything is speculated without actually trying to look at the possible evidence yourself.
For all we know these 'devices' were ancient board games who's sole purpose was entertainment!?