Animals (Other Keyword)
1-7 (7 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and historical data speak to the importance of turtles in the Chesapeake Bay region, which includes the eastern portions of Maryland and Virginia and which serves as a home to nearly 20 species of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine turtles. Despite the many roles that turtles played in pre- and post-contact communities in the area, there...
From Flame to Flowers: Moths and Butterflies in the Codex Borgia Group (2017)
Butterfly imagery in the Borgia Group shows how these volatiles were classified in Postclassic Central Mexico. They are grouped with birds among the 13 "lords of the day" in the Codex Borgia, and they sometimes seem to be interchangeable with moths, especially in imagery of the Fire God. Another god, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, is associated with images of "army worms" devouring maize, symbolizing the caterpillar stage of a moth that distributes its eggs in the wind. Butterfly symbols are naturally...
Life Beyond Circumpolar Cosmologies: New Themes in the Archaeology of Arctic Human-Animal Relations (2017)
In Arctic Archaeology, human-animal relations have traditionally been studied in terms of ecology, optimality and adaptation; more recently, there has been growing interest in understanding how spiritual obligations affected treatment of circumpolar animals and their physical remains. Although these symbolic perspectives were initially useful, many tended to draw on ethnography, especially when using the concept of a single overarching ‘Circumpolar Cosmology; unfortunately, this can reduce...
The New Year Pages of the Dresden Codex and the Concept of Co-essence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Dresden Codex is a Postclassic Maya document that is thought to have originated in the Yucatán Peninsula. The opossum figures in the panels at the tops of its section on the New Year (pages 25-28) are associated with the uayeb, the five nameless, unlucky days that mark the ends of the 365-day haabs. A...
A Relational Geography of Humans and Animals in the Bering Sea Region (2016)
New approaches to animal geography have rapidly emerged over the last twenty years and have challenged accepted views of human–animal relations in a variety of contexts. While archaeologists studying past relational ontologies have explored the spatial components of human interactions with animals, so far archaeology has not explicitly engaged with animal geography. This paper investigates how the “new” or “third wave” animal geography (Urbanik 2012) might inform our understanding of the human...
Social and Spiritual Landscapes in Ancient Mesopotamia (2017)
Ethnobiologists have demonstrated that shared human cognitive processes generate cross-cultural regularities in how people categorize the natural world. The human ability to recognize taxa means that plant and animal classification is not totally arbitrary. In addition, ancient people would have had place-specific knowledge of the particular plants and animals living in the territories they frequented. Representations of plants and animals in relation to each other in a landscape therefore...
Wildlife and Wildlife Habitat of American Samoa. I. Environment and Ecology (1982)
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