Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annick J. E. Daneels.

Dioses Narigudos are a series of ceramic figurines that are extremely frequent during the Classic period in a very restricted area of South Central Veracruz. They occur generally in ritual deposits under floors of major and minor buildings, combining female and male representations of different hierarchy. Current interpretations relate them to a solar deity or a water deity, none of which identifications apply to all three main figurine types. Their attributes and the contexts in which they are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tammy Hodgskiss.

This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From c.100 000 years ago, ochre pieces were habitually collected and used at Middle Stone Age sites in southern Africa. This earthy iron-rich rock has been continually used since then and still has many applications today, such as pigment, sunscreen or body paint for ritual purposes. Although a range of colors were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzi Baram.

This is an abstract from the "Seeking Freedom in the Borderlands: Archaeological Perspectives on Maroon Societies in Florida" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nearly erased from history, the early nineteenth-century marronage of Angola on the Manatee River is now established as part of the Network to Freedom in Florida. Recent excavations provide a view of daily life for the freedom-seeking people. Allied with British filibusters, connected to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mike Makin.

The Hatch site in Prince George County, Virginia is arguably among the most significant precolonial sites in the region. After it was excavated in the 1980s, the collection was stored away and went largely unstudied for the last thirty years. When I first began my research on this ‘orphaned’ site, I was struck by the large pit features containing evidence of ritual feasting and a wide variety of ceramic types. Adhering to the old trope that ‘pots equal people’, I initially assumed that this site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Valdez.

The fringes of the eastern Andean slopes that conform Ecuador’s Ceja de Montaña are a steep transitional zone between the cordillera highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, where altitude varies from 1800 to ca.-400 masl, The ceja is covered by a dense humid tropical forest that has been traditionally seen as unfit for the development of social complexity. In spite of the apparent adverse ecological conditions this region became an important cultural area around 5000 years ago. A precocious...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Whitehead.

This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Medicinal Plant use for Southeastern New Mexico is presented, covering major plant types, uses, and ecology. In collaboration with a botanist, who specializes in New Mexico flora, we present data on 331 plant species. The process of knowledge production will be addressed, as all of this information is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marsha Sims.

Research ties Mesoamerican search for ancestors to U.S. rock art. A hero in Mexican Aztec legend fought his sister, Coyolxauhqui, and the titans, decapitating her, rolling her body down the mountain, and leaving her head on the mountain. Coyolxauhqui is a floating head on Mesoamerican murals, decapitated and dismembered on the Coyolxauhqui stone. She was the moon, queen, and an avatar of their Earth Mother. She is commemorated in Basketmaker and later rock art in Colorado and Utah at 5 Faces and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Jennifer Cochran. Rachel Horowitz.

This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Marine shell was a highly valued long-distance trade material for the ancient Maya beginning as early as the Middle Preclassic. Symbolically, marine shell represented the watery underworld and was often used in ritual offerings that reference cosmological ordering of the world. Evidence for Middle Preclassic marine shell bead...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre. Diego Matadamas.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The offerings at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan contain several lithic artifacts that were miniature versions of ornaments, weapons and attire, which were used to produce religious images. For the Mexicas, the act of placing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mississippian and Oneota entanglements were often violent, typically resulting in intercommunity conflict, loss of life, and population displacement. However, Mississippians in the northern Lower Mississippi Valley may have comprised a sufficiently large territorial bloc to have successfully thwarted Oneota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham. Juan Manuel Palomo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations in the Amoch Group of Ceibal, a minor ceremonial complex located outside of the site epicenter, have provided new insights into the transition from the Preceramic to the Middle Preclassic periods in the Maya lowlands (ca. 1000 BC). Previous investigations in the civic-ceremonial core of Ceibal revealed an E Group dating to around 950...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

Informed by ethnographic accounts, iconography has helped clarify how people materialized otherwise intangible aspects of their realities. In this paper, I examine the use of raccoons in imagery from Mississippian archaeological contexts. By considering placement of independent raccoon motifs in iconographic scenes, as well as raccoon motifs associated with figures, I identify use patterns of raccoon imagery. Considering these iconographic data alongside faunal data generated from Spiro,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erella Hovers. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble had strong views about the cognitive abilities and symbolic behavior of premodern humans as he gleaned them from the archaeological record through engravings, ornaments, burials, etc. After publishing a number of papers touching on these issues, mostly in the 1990s, Dibble...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schaefer. Gabriel Prieto. John Verano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Child sacrifice has been practiced by many ancient societies over time although archaeological evidence is often lacking. Scholars have attempted to investigate the motivations behind intentional state-sanctioned killings; however, the missing archaeological context leaves these interpretations up for debate. Outside of modern-day Trujillo, recent excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Briggs. Heather Lapham.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestic pigs, first introduced to sixteenth-century Native Americans in the Southeast by Spanish entradas, provided a familiar and suitably European food source for colonists who settled the region. Over the next two to three centuries, local Indigenous cuisines also incorporated pig meat and fat, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

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. In this session, we seek to reveal rituals that have been silenced and broaden our understandings of indigenous rituals in North American archaeology. The treatment of this topic requires a diverse set of perspectives due to its complexity as well as the ways that past rituals continue to reverberate in the present. Central to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Borislava Simova.

Our understanding of the ancient Maya is informed to a great extent by the material remains of ritual performance in both domestic and public contexts. Maya populations throughout Mesoamerica were united by a shared cosmology patterning the timing, location, and material aspects of ritual performance. Yet, ritual was not a static or rigid construct, dutifully replicated across populations. At the site of Actuncan, Belize, we find that aspects of domestic ritual cycles, - including form, content,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saburo Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intensive excavations carried out by the Proyecto Templo de Quetzalcoatl more than 20 years ago suggested that the pyramid symbolized human sacrifice, warfare, and rulership in Teotihuacan. The lack of a royal tomb inside the building indicated that more than 200 warriors were sacrificed in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Bellorado.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancestral Pueblo people in southeastern Utah seem to have been obsessed with sandals and their depictions during the thirteenth century. Recent research has documented hundreds of sandal depictions on plaster and rock surfaces in the area dating to this period, but how should archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phyllis Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists studying the Maya have traditionally considered obsidian to be a luxury good that was often tightly controlled by the elite during the Classic period. Archaeological evidence from the Classic Maya capital of Tamarindito in Guatemala challenges these long-held assumptions, however. At Tamarindito, multiple lines of evidence support the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Smith. Gudmundur Ólafsson.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of 850 years, Surtshellir—a massive lava cave in western Iceland’s rugged interior—was variously described as a geological wonder, a shelter for outlaws, an abode of ghosts and spirits, a tourist's dream, a place of torture, the wilderness, an archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guilhem Olivier. Vera Tiesler.

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. Beyond the general idea of benefiting society and placating the divine, the polyvalent symbols and meanings of ancient religious sacrifices can be interpreted properly only after combining different disciplinary lenses. In this paper, we scrutinize iconographic and ethnohistorical testimonies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Mattson. Jacque Kocer.

In the late 1890s, the Hyde Exploring Expedition collected over 650 finished ornaments from Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito. UNM’s recent re-excavation of the room, including material derived from backdirt from adjacent rooms as well as intact floor and subfloor deposits, produced thousands of additional ornaments and pieces of lapidary debris. This paper presents the results of the analysis of this combined assemblage and discusses its significance in relation to ornaments found in other portions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pablo Arias.

Caves provide a privileged context for the study of Prehistoric ritual activity. Inside them, we enjoy the unique possibility of directly observing and analyzing spatial features that have hardly changed (and in some cases have not changed at all) since the Paleolithic. However, the poor preservation of the archaeological evidence during the earliest years of the research, and particularly the enormous cultural gap between the Paleolithic codes and systems of beliefs and the modern observers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker. Sarah Boudreaux.

The ancient Maya community of Wari Camp was organized into a quincunx pattern of four quarters delineated by the intersection of two inter-cardinal alignments. One was formed by a series of "temple-on-the-east" groups running northwest to southeast. The other consisted of a massive, northeast-to-southwest trending drainage modified for foot traffic. At their intersection stood an uncarved stela. Other stelae marked crossroads, while pairs of temple groups stood at entrances into the drainage...