Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley.

Activities at large ceremonial complexes are interpreted as regional community endeavors that form group identities and reify social and political structures. Imposing monuments such as Dún Ailinne, Navan Fort, and Rathcrogan have provided tantalizing glimpses into ritual and ceremonial performances of the Irish Iron Age (500 BC-AD 500). Communal feasting has been suggested to be a key practice at these sites during the later periods of use. At feasts, social structure and identity are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Shephard. Martin Gallivan.

Seventeenth-century colonial chroniclers repeatedly mention a series of places and objects that surrounded political negotiations and efforts at alliance-building by Powhatan societies. While regional scholarship has focused on competition over subsistence resources, regional trade dynamics, and the regulated exchange of "prestige goods" as central to the development of these political structures, we shift the focus toward the engagement between these societies and specific places and objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only João Zilhão.

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. The Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is a watershed. By the later Upper Paleolithic, all continents were occupied, all the world’s ecosystems were exploited, and all aspects of ethnographically observed hunter-gatherer culture the archaeological record can preserve are indeed found. Prior to about 100,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios. Mauricio Díaz García. Agapito Carballo. Samuel Pinto.

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores evidence of women’s ritual practice at Río Amarillo, a site located 20 km from the Classic period center of Copan. While the ritual activities of royal women are largely hidden from view in Copan’s Acropolis, excavations at the site of Río Amarillo and in the groups surrounding it uncovered two contexts that were particularly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Anna Novotny. Brett Houk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary customs and monumental architecture in the Maya Region are viewed by archaeologists as markers of social status and complexity. The intersection of mortuary rituals and the built environment gives us a window through which to understand the development of social complexity. Excavations at Chan Chich, a medium-sized city located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Aiuvalasit.

Across cultures, the ritual use of water is nearly ubiquitous, yet most archaeological studies of water focus primarily on its socio-economic importance. The large (~200-1500 person) mesa-top Ancestral Pueblo (AD 1100-1700) villages of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico are particularly good contexts for the archaeological study of water because small water storage features, often referred to as reservoirs, are found at many villages across the region. Alternative hypotheses for feature function,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mathiowetz.

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his seminal article on Andean plazas, Jerry Moore (1996) characterized plazas as spaces that serve as a setting for diverse public interactions, including as arenas that help to structure verbal and nonverbal ritual communication in the context of ritually infused power dynamics. In the Puebloan and Mogollon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Wolff.

Whole ceramic vessels and sherds incised after firing are known from Middle Horizon sites in the Wari heartland and periphery, associated with offering, burial and ceramic production contexts. Incisions include a wide variety of forms and have been interpreted as graffiti, makers or owners marks, and score marks to control breakage. The presence and forms of post-fired incisions were recorded during inventory of all ceramics excavated at Huari by the Huari Urban Prehistory Program in 2017. Their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lorenz. Ana Margarida Moço. Rachel Holland. Rui Mataloto. Brandon Lewis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Freixo Archaeology Project was initiated in 2015 to investigate the nature of Roman Imperial occupation in the Iberian Peninsula with an interest in the symbolic and ideological reuse of sacred space. Freixo is located within the Municipality of Redondo in southeastern Portugal, where a sixteenth-century Christian church overlays an ancient Roman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Two chambers in Midnight Terror Cave, Belize show undeniable evidence of Maya child sacrifice. Operation V and Operation VIII are the deepest darkest chambers of the cave where some of the most important of ancient Maya rites were performed including human sacrifice. In 2009 Ann Scott proposed that sacrifices occurred in Operation VIII and, during ritual cleaning of this public space in preparation for a new ceremony, the bones were taken from their primary deposition site and moved to Operation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Rodríguez. Aaron Wright.

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of a sacralized landscape is popularly associated with site-specific Native American religious beliefs and practices, but a landscape and its features can have religious meaning for other people as well. This paper examines the northern New Mexican folk-Catholic tradition of religious procession. Processions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Axel Nielsen.

How do prophecy and new religious movements impact life histories of artifacts and architecture? Ethnographic evidence indicates that prophets realize their visions, in part, by transforming relationships between people and material objects. They shun, embrace, or reorient technologies, artifacts, and architecture. Not surprisingly, in cultures where spiritual forces already animate artifacts and architecture, such reorganizations can produce dramatic changes in material culture. Much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Buck Woodard. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popularly known as “Powhatan’s Mantle,” the shell-decorated and sewn animal skins are an iconic object of material culture from seventeenth-century Virginia. On display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, we argue that the Mantle’s provenance and possible links to Indigenous cosmology have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reitz.

The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Campana. Pam Crabtree. Susan Johnston. Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dún Ailinne is an Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE-400 CE) site in Country Kildare, Ireland. It is considered as one of the Irish "royal" sites. These sites are mentioned in the early medieval literature and are large sites surrounded by an inverted bank and ditch and containing monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

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. Studies of feathered serpent imagery during Mesoamerica's Formative Period range widely in their conclusions, with little agreement about the parameters of inquiry, associated iconographic conventions, or even what constitutes a "feathered" serpent. Images of serpentine creatures have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents micro-CT histological data on bone samples from Aksum’s Stelae Park cemetery (AD 50–400). Aksum was the capital of an ancient polity (AD 50–800) that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and was a major global power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable lasting remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists in the North American Southwest and other regions recognize that ritual closure of structures reveals information about relations with ancestors, fear of dangerous forces, and other interactions between spiritual and material realms. We want to understand how such ceremonies might differ through time or place. Perhaps they form regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chun Yu.

This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of the last two decades there have been a number of hoards of Buddhist statues excavated in Northern China. Each of these hoards contains several hundred statues of varying forms and quality. This study examines both the form and the tool marks on the statues to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Bassett.

The Somali Coast has long been a center of global commerce. At the confluence of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, port cities like Zeila and Berbera witnessed the arrival of Greek and Roman traders (ca. AD200) and Chinese merchants (ca. AD1300). Contacts with Muslim merchants from the Arabian Peninsula (ca. AD800) were particularly transformative, and by the tenth century, communities across Djibouti and Somaliland were converts. Scholars have hypothesized that pre-Islamic "monument sites"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Ryan Williams.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chip has always been a big thinker about the capacity for violence in the human species and has pioneered ways of thinking about warfare in the Andean past that has revolutionized the field. He has also explored the roles of ritual and symbolism in his more recent work and his insights have influenced the ways the current...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sharisse McCafferty. Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonial period ethnohistorical sources recorded the religious practices of the Contact period Nicarao of Pacific Nicaragua, including a pantheon of deities, use of a ritual calendar, and other ceremonies. These were closely affiliated with the religion of Nahua central Mexico, linked to the purported migration of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kaleigh Best. Jessica Spencer. Mark Wagner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. St. Henry’s Catholic Cemetery (11S1742), located in East St. Louis, IL, was in use between 1866 and 1908 and mainly served the surrounding German and Irish communities. Despite repeated claims of full relocation since its closure, the presence of burials on site has been debated. However, recent excavations reveal a likely large number of burials were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Bythell. Sara L. Juengst. Richard M. Lunniss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are many questions that have yet to be answered about the prehistoric people of Ecuador, especially along the southern coast. In particular, more studies are needed in order to understand how people lived and interacted with each other and the landscape at the important ritual site of Salango. Salango was occupied from 4000 BCE through Spanish contact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Howell.

The exchange of exotic goods between disparate geographic and cultural groups across the Midwest and Southeast is a hallmark of the Hopewell Period. Ceramics Are recognized by archaeologists as an important component of this interaction sphere. This exchange is usually conceptualized as whole vessels moving across the landscape. In this paper, it is posited that sherds could be the unit of exchange instead. Using ritual circuits as a theoretical framework, this preliminary paper seeks to lay a...