Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Roa. Ashley Sharpe. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional zooarchaeological methods studying trade rely on the identification of animals found outside their natural habitat ranges. More recently, strontium isotope (86Sr/87Sr) analyses have proven to be a powerful tool for studying the movement of animals found in archaeological contexts. Strontium isotopic evidence from the Maya lowlands has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew MacIver.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Gallivan.

This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to places with deep histories throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Algonquian groups traveled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Stanton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the projectile points recovered from the South Diamond Creek Pueblo (SDCP) site. This project took place over two summers in 2016 and 2017 and involved a salvage excavation of a Classic Mimbres pueblo. The excavation of the site yielded numerous intact projectile points in various contexts. By integrating a Behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aimee Alvarado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Peri-abandonment deposits in the Maya region have been a source of contention in recent years given the varied artifact assemblages and the lack of clear understanding for their purpose. This research describes peri-abandonment deposits at Xunantunich, Group B, an elite residential plazuela group located approximately 150 meters from the site core. Excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saul Hedquist. Samantha Fladd. Vincent M. LaMotta. Nancy Odegaard.

This paper honors the anthropological contributions of the Homol’ovi Research Program (HRP) and its directors. We reflect on the conception and implementation of field and curation protocols that enabled years of innovative research into ancient Pueblo lifeways, work that continues today. Though fieldwork in the region has ceased, researchers still benefit from exceptional field recording standards, sound conservation techniques, and an explicitly behavioral project methodology. HRP was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melanie Cootsona.

This paper explores the role of animals as social actors, namely the way natural animal behaviors influence human religious settings. The paper focuses on the case study of a floor organization of a formally closed thirteenth century Northern Tiwa kiva in the Northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. The worldview and beliefs of the Northern Tiwa were deeply shaped by the species and biomes with whom they co-habited. Through the synthesis of material data, ethnographic information and behavioral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Lev-Tov.

Within recent years, feasting and other forms of ritual consumption have become more frequently identified in the archaeozoological record of the ancient Near East. Reasons for more frequent identification of ritual sacrifices and feasts vary, but two driving forces certainly are archaeological context, bones found in or near special architecture, and the cultural milieu formed by the region’s ancient textual record. In contrast, I have a skeptical tale to tell of ritual production and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail. Allen Christenson.

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. Scholars have long recognized that certain Mesoamerican deities appear in animal as well as anthropomorphic form. The Maya creator Itzamna, for example, has aspects corresponding to a bird, a turtle, and an alligator, while the aged "God L" may be linked to the opossum in its anthropomorphic form (Pawah-Ooch),...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Schollmeyer.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines contextual patterns in deposits of animal bones from the Mimbres and upper Gila areas of southwest New Mexico from the Mimbres Classic through Cliff phase Salado periods (AD 1000–1450). Remains of common animal species in contexts like sheet middens and room fill are often interpreted as food remains....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses results from examination of faunal remains and iconography from Spiro Mounds, Oklahoma. By combining multiple analyses, this research yielded data useful to recognizing animal use patterns at the site that may suggest how ideological structures affected food choice at the site. In particular, this paper highlights some examples that may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Alarcón Tinajero. Christopher Morehart. Angela Huster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Censers are a subset of Mesoamerican ceramics interpreted as ritual vessels used to burn incense. In ancient central Mexico, censers tend to feature mold made or handmade clay ornaments that were possibly part of iconographically composite vessels. A challenge in their interpretation, however, is that these complex vessels are often found in isolated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mélanie Ferras.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pututus are marine shell trumpets (organologically, horns), known in the prehispanic Central Andes from the Archaic period to the Late Horizon. Different classes of those sound-producing artifacts have been discovered: some of them cut from various species of marine gastropods, and others produced in ceramics...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carrie Heitman. Paul Reed.

The goal of this paper is to bring together disparate data sources on various Chaco-era sites both within Chaco Canyon, NM and outside (Salmon Pueblo) to examine the use of ash in intramural contexts. In light of recent work on the dimensions of animation, precedence, ancestors and heirlooms evident in Chacoan architecture, what patterns emerge regarding the deliberate use and deposition of ash? And how might we use Puebloan ethnographic accounts of ash to help inform our interpretations? ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Wooten.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Journey with me to the year 2167, where our intrepid archaeologist has made a fascinating discovery... a FOOB! Carefully cradled in its pale pink packaging, this breast prosthetic is thought to have had ritual purposes, and while the prosthetics do not deteriorate over time, intact packaging has never been found in situ before! This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mavis Greer. John W. Greer.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Knowing the past through rock art interpretation has been a hallmark of Polly Schaafsma’s rock art studies. She has advocated and practiced her stance that the meaning of rock art is not a guessing game but is instead the result of data collection and analysis completed within a theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Andrea Celis Ng Teajan.

Desde el descubrimiento de una ofrenda masiva de objetos rituales hallada fortuitamente en un arroyo, el sitio Arqueológico de Arroyo Pesquero enclavado en el área nuclear olmeca ha generado una serie de discusiones acerca de la autenticidad de piezas dispersas en museos y colecciones privadas. Las piezas más representativas son máscaras y hachas de piedra verde con una iconografía propia de la cultura olmeca. Sin embargo, una parte del material del sitio se ha subestimado. Por Medellín Zenil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

Throughout much of the Southwestern U.S., ash was an important component of ritual deposition and has ethnographically been closely associated with processes of cleansing and renewal. The presence of ash in ritual contexts is well documented, but it also appears to have played an important role in the closing of domestic structures. In this paper, I present cases of ritual closure of domestic structures and examine the role that ash played in these closures using data from pithouse sites in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judy Berryman. William H. Walker.

Magic and witchcraft, like many classic topics in the anthropology of religion, involve everyday things such as dogs, plant pollen, ashes, and arrow points. As such the archaeological record offers a rich source of ancient religious practices if we can link formation of its deposits to past ritual activities. For example, strata exhibiting ash and projectile points deposited on floors and in the fill of abandoned houses may derive from protective magic. Rather than haphazardly tossed hearth...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Dalton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subterranean chambers known as chultuns or chultunob exist in great numbers in sites throughout the Maya world, with over 300 being found in the city site of El Mirador alone. Although seemingly ubiquitous, the function of these structures has yet to be fully understood, with a variety of uses having been proposed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Ott.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twin-temple pyramids of the Late Postclassic in Central Mexico became a distinct symbol of Aztec ideology. Nowhere is this demonstrated more than with Templo Mayor, the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán, the capital city of the Aztec empire. The deities worshiped and rituals conducted at Templo Mayor made it a beacon of ideological identity for the Mexica-Aztec,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya hieroglyphs are an invaluable source of data about the Classic period religion. However, when it comes to sweat baths, only a small subset of archaeologically investigated structures contains inscriptions. Therefore, any attempt to study this particular aspect of Maya ritual life should consider a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jim Railey.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bedrock mortars are common features in various parts of the world, including western North America. They are most often viewed as food-processing facilities, and indeed there is ample historical evidence for this function, especially from California and parts of the Great Basin. However, there is also evidence that bedrock mortars, or similar features, were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of human sacrifice is one of the defining traits of ancient Mesoamerica, at least according to the modern imagination. But painted objects, carvings, and codices reveal that nonhuman animals often served as sacrificial victims as well. Were some classes or species of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steve Davis. Knut Rassmann.

This is an abstract from the "On the Periphery or the Leading Edge? Research in Prehistoric Ireland" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Brú na Bóinne World Heritage Site is known globally for its middle Neolithic passage tombs, in particular the 'megatombs' of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange. However, the area also possesses one of the highest densities of late Neolithic monuments in the henge tradition anywhere in the world. These comprise a variety...