animism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Timothy Pauketat. Christopher Carr. Robert Hall. George Lankford.

The authors attempt to understand pan-continental cultural relationships as well as explain how cosmologies developed through time in the eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America. To do this, the authors deal with both the overall traditions of entire populations or time periods and specific, local expressions of these overall traditions.

PROJECT Santa Fe Institute.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. Will Russell.

During the pre-Classic era (ca. AD 400-1150), pithouses and houses-in-pits were the preferred modes of residential architecture among Hohokam communities. When excavated, these wood-framed domiciles often show signs of burning, which effectively closed the structures’ lifecycles as dwellings. Among affiliated and descendant communities such as the O’odham and some Yuman-speaking groups, a person’s death could prompt the burning of their home in order to combat any pollution, sickness, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Mead.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy F. Markel.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists are moving away from just classifying objects in dryly scientific ways that obscure meanings and the past people who used them. We are attempting to view items through the lenses of their users. As we study Native American material culture, this means understanding the agency that inheres in artifacts. Great Lakes Anishinaabeg understood that objects both constrain and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Brown.

Archaeologists typically dissect rock art stylistically, symbolically, and chronologically. Symbols, in particular, lead to studies of representational imagery, entoptic phenomena, or religious icons. What remains underexplored is the concept of animism and its related behavioral activities. This paper applies a behavioral theory of communication to study the interactions between people and things. It uses performance characteristics analysis to determine the activities associated with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, a new political and religious capital expanded its influence in the North American Southwest. This settlement, called Paquimé or Casas Grandes, was the focus of pilgrimages that reflected and reinforced the social dominance of the elites living at the community. However, caches of millions of ocean shell, instances of human sacrifice, and other aspects of the archaeological record indicate that Paquimé itself was likely considered a living entity that helped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Susan Alt.

Various archaeological approaches exaggerate relations with objects at the expense of the affectivity of substances, phenomena, materials, and spaces. New data from the 11th century foundations of the Cahokian world suggest that the experience of substantial, phenomenal, material and spatial qualities were the primary constituents of a form of religious conversion also known as Mississippianization. Circular buildings at the Emerald site embodied these qualities and point to the creation of...