sacrifice (Other Keyword)
1-21 (21 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from the Late Shang state (ca. 1300 – 1046 BC) based in Anyang to the Western Zhou state (ca. 1046 – 771 BC) founded in Shaanxi represents one of the most significant geopolitical and cultural transformations in ancient China. The conquest of the Shang by a Zhou-led alliance precipitated in the elimination of the human sacrificial rituals...
Alimento para las deidades: Nuevas prácticas sacrificiales y post sacrificiales en los centros mesoamericanos del Epiclásico y Posclásico inicial (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Durante las últimas décadas se han documentado varios conjuntos de restos humanos no reverenciales y altamente procesados en diferentes estados de manipulación dentro el territorio de Mesoamérica. En un principio se les apreció como hechos aislados hasta...
Beautiful Virgins and Male War Captives: The Role of Sex Attribution in Ancient Maya Human Sacrifice at Midnight Terror Cave, Belize (2017)
The prurient element in the popular notion of the Maya sacrifice of "beautiful virgins" during the first half of the twentieth century (Frost and Arnold 1909; Willard 1926) appears to have made researchers wary of the topic of gender in study of human sacrifice. The interest in human sacrifice arose in the 1990s at the same time as the formulation of the warfare hypothesis for the collapse of Maya civilization (Demerast 1990) so that models of human sacrifice tended to assume that victims were...
Biodistance Comparisons for the Chimú-Era (AD 1000–1450) Child Sacrificial Remains from Pampa la Cruz, Huanchaco, North Coast of Peru: A Preliminary Report (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we report dentally derived biodistance results for 120 Chimú-era (AD 1000–1450) children from three of six temporally discrete sacrificial events—specifically events 1, 4, and 5, at Pampa la Cruz (PLC), Huanchaco, Perú, which we compare with a late Chimú-Inka affiliated skeletal sample (n = 44) from the nearby cemetery at Iglesia Colonial, Huanchaco,...
Cosmology in the New World
This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.
Death that Endures: A Bioarchaeological and Biogeochemcial Study of Human Sacrifices from the Moche Valley, Peru (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project investigates how rituals of human sacrifice performed by the Chimú Empire (AD 1000/1100-1450/1470) transformed in response to Inca imperialism (AD 1450-1532) in the Moche Valley of Peru. Recent discoveries of hundreds of sacrificial victims in the Moche Valley suggest that ritual violence was used to maintain the sociopolitical and religious...
Earth Offerings as Sacrifice in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca (2016)
This paper considers the relationship between sacrifice and the people, practices, and objects assembled on later Formative period public buildings in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca. Excavations in public buildings at numerous sites in the region have found evidence for ceremonial practices including the emplacement of earth offerings, the interment of human bodies in cemeteries, and ritual feasting. The objects emplaced in public buildings as offerings included ceramic vessels, greenstone,...
The Iconography and History of the Hacha in Classic Veracruz (2016)
The hacha has long served as a key element in the yoke/hacha/palma complex of portable sculpture known chiefly for Classic Veracruz (c. 100-1000 CE) and closely related to the Mesoamerican ball game. Scholars have rightly associated hacha iconography with a specific decapitation sacrifice and related that sacrifice to rites surrounding rubber ball game. While this iconographical analysis is sound, it does little to explain the appearance of the hacha as a new category of material object, as well...
Kukulkcan's Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapan (2014)
Kukulcan's Realm chronicles the fabric of socioeconomic relationships and religious practice that bound the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapán's urban residents together for nearly three centuries. Presenting results of ten years of household archaeology at the city, including field research and laboratory analysis, the book discusses the social, political, economic, and ideological makeup of this complex urban center. Masson and Peraza Lope's detailed overview provides evidence of a vibrant...
Maya Child Sacrifice Via Cranial Punctures (2017)
Our knowledge of Maya human sacrifice is drawn from iconographic representations and contact period Spanish sources. Unfortunately, the corpus related to child sacrifice is extremely limited. In 1971 David M. Pendergast described the burial of a child from Eduardo Quiroz Cave with traumatic perimortem holes in the parietals. Later, Brady reported on a second child with similar wounds. Both Pendergast and Brady interpreted the evidence as reflecting child sacrifice. The recovery of thousands...
Palaces at La Joya, Classic Period Central Veracruz: Architectural and Ideological Evidence (2017)
La Joya was the capital of a very small state during the 1st millennium AD in South Central Veracruz. This region is rarely associated with major political power, though obviously it was of high prestige in the Mesoamerican world in terms of the distribution of the paraphernalia associated with the ballgame ritual. Two contemporary monumental platforms at the site can be interpreted as palaces, with administrative, residential, ritual, and service areas, one possibly housing a political and the...
Ritual Human Sacrifice among the Tarascans (2018)
This study reports on osteological remains excavated from the Great Platform at Tzintzuntzán, the Postclassic (A.D. 1300-1522) Tarascan ceremonial capital. The osteological deposit was first uncovered by Alfonso Caso in 1937-1944, re-visited by Rubin de Borbolla and Roman Piña Chan during the 1960’s, by Efrain Cardenas in 1992, and most recently in 2011 by the Proyecto Especial de Michoacán. In 1992, 194 skull fragments (MNI=40) and 28 modified femur fragments were recovered while the most...
Role of Handstones in Mesoamerican Ballgame (2015)
Handstone is one of the artifacts that is associated with the Mesoamerican ballgame. However, barely any research has been published about them, since 1961, when Stephan Borhegyi first analyzed them. He identified that the handstones vary in size and shape. In the past, it has been suggested that they could be used to serve the ball when initiating the ballgame. Recent analysis of their size, abrasion, and context in imagery identifies the improbability of using them as a serving tool. Not a...
The Role of Venus in the Cosmologies of Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and the Southeast (2010)
This paper describes differing but related views of the meanings of Venus in Central Mexico, West Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, and the Eastern Woodlands.
Sacrifice and Social Identity: Untangling Identity from a Mass Burial at Matrix 101, Huaca Las Ventanas, Peru (2015)
Typically, burials are laden with symbols of social identity such as age, sex, and wealth of grave goods. However, conceptualizing individual or group identity can become problematic when examining non-modal or deviant burials. During the 2011-2013 field seasons, the National Sicán Museum and the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project recovered over 200 individuals from a Late Middle Sicán (A.D 1050 - 1100) sacrificial context designated Matrix 101. Constructed in three separate phases during a...
Sacrifice at Midnight Terror Cave, Belize (2016)
Skeletal data from Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) have recently been used to suggest that individuals with physical deformities would have formed a class of “social outcasts” who were preferentially selected as sacrificial victims. Close scrutiny reveals a number of flaws in the data used. The extraction and sequencing of DNA recovered from a number of the bones in question is used to clarify the situation. Considering the size of the MTC assemblage, well over 100 individuals, the authors are...
Sacrifice Reconsidered: Interpreting Stress from Archaeological Hair at Huaca de los Sacrificios (2017)
The Inka Empire (AD 1450-1532) practiced flexible forms of statecraft that affected their periphery populations across the cordillera. Lived experiences of different Inka subjects differed in varied ways, which therefore requires nuanced bioarchaeological approaches. This study aims to interpret psychosocial stress through assays of cortisol in archaeological hair from sacrificed individuals (n=19) recovered in the Huaca de los Sacrificios at the Chotuna-Chornancap Archaeological complex. This...
Sacrificial Landscapes and the Anatomy of Moche Biopolitics (2016)
Power in Moche society was fundamentally biopolitical, expressed through the violent deconstruction and reconstruction of bodies, including animate places. An examination of Moche architecture reveals that North Coast populations envisioned built environments as living organisms that were biologically dependent on human communities. The erection and renovation of Moche ceremonial architecture played an instrumental role in the generation of life and the harnessing of vital forces. Therefore,...
Statistically Comparing Demographic Distributions of Mortuary Assemblages (2017)
This analysis includes data from 50 archaeological mortuary assemblages variously attributed to sacrifice, warfare, and standard mortality processes. The research compares two sites, both attributed to sacrifice, to those produced by the two alternative processes of warfare and standard mortality and explores the question of whether these assemblages may be differentiated from them based on the age distribution of deaths. The analysis incorporates a novel feature in that preservation bias is...
Toward an Ideology of Mesoamerican Ritual Sacrifice: An Interdisciplinary Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a cultural adaptive strategy, ritual sacrifice throughout Mesoamerica has had multiple purposes including providing a sense of control over the forces of nature aimed at attaining desired outcomes, especially those related to agricultural production. When human sacrifice was involved, such...
When You’re Feeling Blue: Maya Blue Fibers in Dental Calculus of Sacrificial Victims (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Subterranean in Mesoamerican Indigenous Culture and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Surveyed in 2008–2010, Midnight Terror Cave contains the comingled remains of at least 118 Maya sacrificial victims from the Classic period (250–925 CE). Although previous studies have shown Maya populations to have high dental caries rates and enamel hypoplasia corresponding with weening, the Midnight Terror collection does...