Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

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. Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Ainsworth. Patricia Crown. Emily Lena Jones. Stephanie Franklin.

Birds are an important part of both modern and historic Puebloan ceremonialism: live birds, stuffed birds, and bird wings and feathers are used in prayers, in ceremonies, as sacrifices, and in the creation of ritual paraphernalia. Archaeological evidence suggests birds held a similar role in the past for some prehispanic Southwestern groups, including members of the Chaco phenomenon. Pueblo Bonito is one member of the Chaco system that might be expected to contain evidence of ritual use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia M. Campos. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Carlos Karam.

This study reports on osteological remains excavated from the Great Platform at Tzintzuntzán, the Postclassic (A.D. 1300-1522) Tarascan ceremonial capital. The osteological deposit was first uncovered by Alfonso Caso in 1937-1944, re-visited by Rubin de Borbolla and Roman Piña Chan during the 1960’s, by Efrain Cardenas in 1992, and most recently in 2011 by the Proyecto Especial de Michoacán. In 1992, 194 skull fragments (MNI=40) and 28 modified femur fragments were recovered while the most...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Amanda Semanko. Robert DeBry.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs, as the first domesticated species, have held a wide range of roles in human societies including hunting assistants, guardians, companions, and food sources. In this poster we will explore their ceremonial roles through a comparative analysis of the life histories of ritually deposited dogs. Specifically, we will compare Southwest dog burials to a late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivy Faulkner.

Gift exchange is most often discussed as an economic transaction. Whether goods are exchanged for social, political or cultural capital, the model for examining the practice is based on a commodity framework. However, gift exchange is also a performance, often with prescribed behaviors based on the culture and the individuals participating in the exchange. This behavior clearly falls within the realm of ritual as much as that of trade or economics. In this paper, I discuss gift exchange as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Skeates. Jessica Beckett. Cezary Namirski.

This paper understands performance as an embodied, site-specific and temporary event. It consequently emphasizes the diversity of ritual performances identifiable archaeologically, not only in the context of different types of cave and rock-shelter, but also between these and other types of site in the landscape. In doing so, the paper evaluates the liminality of these places and ritual performances, which were – to varying degrees – separated spatially, temporally and symbolically from the rest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine McLeester. Mark Schurr.

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. Ethnographic accounts of indigenous communities throughout the United States illustrate the many ways that ritual activities were deeply embedded into everyday life. However, moving to the American Midwestern archaeological record, treatments of ritual are typically limited to large, ceremonial sites and these everyday rituals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Carly Pope. Morgan Russell.

In Tahcabo, Yucatán, 5% of the town’s municipal land is contained within rejolladas. Rejolladas, like cenotes, are sinkholes formed in the karstic bedrock of Yucatán, although they do not reach to the level of the water table. They make for ideal gardens when located within settlements, as their low elevation allows for the collection of deep and moisture-rich soil that provides an advantage for the cultivation of almost any plant. At the nearby site of Kulubá it has also been shown that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

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. Classic Maya period inscriptions provide us with extensive documentation of the rituals and ceremonies that Maya elites performed as part of their royal duties. Throughout this paper we will discuss those that were overseen by women belonging to the royal houses of the polities of the Maya lowlands, which have been recorded through the images and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lawrence Loendorf.

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. Sacred Sites Research, Inc. and Versar Inc., working in cooperation with the Mescalero Apache Tribe and the Hopi Tribe, recorded and evaluated 17 rock art sites in New Mexico's Permian Basin, a project supported through the Bureau of Land Management programmatic agreement. Sixteen of the sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Gowland.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of the bounded body is powerfully resonant within the post-industrialised western world; it is performed and reinforced through cultural practices which observe the maintenance of bodily space and the delineation of individual bodies. Recent research on the developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis, epigenetics and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Walter Klippel has always focused his research on animal remains from archaeological sites, especially from Southeast North America. In honor of his retirement, we review how animals are depicted in Precontact rock art sites from the region he knew so well. A wide variety of creatures—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and even insects—were illustrated by ancient southeastern artists. Animal imagery appears in both open air and cave art, although the kinds of animals vary between these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Neitzel. David Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inextricable combination of color and raw material was the most fundamental characteristic of Ancestral Pueblo jewelry. For white and shell, blue-green and turquoise, and black and various types of stone, the color and the material each had diverse sets of sacred meanings that gave ornaments their value. Together,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological projects, such as those of the Palatine-Pendici nord-est excavation, are bringing new materials and new clarity to the processes of social change that lead to urbanism in Rome, Italy. The Curiae Veteres sanctuary, located in the heart of Rome on the northern slopes of the Palatine Hill, gives exceptional insight into the earliest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Perdikaris. Sandrine Grouard.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across the Caribbean, there are numerous dog burials from the Saladoid period and they warrant a closer look as to their purpose and function. Dog remains have been found both as burials associated with human graves but also in refuse middens along with other archaeofauna from prehistoric meals. This paper will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lacey Point is a distinctive landmark rising above the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park. This prominent butte harbors a concentration of Ancestral Pueblo petroglyphs encompassing themes of fertility and hunting. Associated with these petroglyphs is a large and diverse artifact assemblage, including thousands of ceramic sherds. This is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Montoya Mar. Maby Medrano Enríquez.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Festivals and religious beliefs in contemporary Mexico are the product of a cultural synthesis between the Mesoamerican religion and Christianity. In this presentation we expose the survival of a battle scene between Spaniards and indigenous tribes represented in a patronal feast known as Los Tastoanes, in which one of the main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Prentiss. Alysha Edwards.

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. Public sharing of food and gifts remains important to St’át’imc communities of interior British Columbia today despite decades of prohibition by Canadian authorities. The archaeological record offers evidence that public events involving large scale food preparation and sharing were commonly practiced at least since ca. 1300...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Rees.

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. Early historical accounts suggest that drums played an important role in the ceremonial life of the prehistoric southeastern United States. However, because they were made in whole or in part of ephemeral materials, drums are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Interestingly, historical records,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Gamble.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Secret societies are groups of individuals that possess esoteric knowledge that is not available to non-members, and therefore are by definition exclusive. Many such societies are associated with administering ritual ceremonies. The Chumash Indians of southern California had a secret society known as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Schaffer. Robert Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves act as the mythological archetype and physical portals that validate the cosmogony-cosmology-eschatology spectrum of many past and present human societies. Among the prehistoric Lucayan-Taíno of the Bahamas, caves played an important role in both validating perceptions of the cosmos, but also the maintenance of ancestral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Stephens Reed. Michelle I. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ancient Puebloan occupation of the Aztec complex in northwest New Mexico spanned a tumultuous two and a half centuries that saw the arrival of Chacoan people and Chacoan ways in the Animas Valley in the late 11th century C.E., followed by the waning influence of Chaco by 1140, and a new era of Aztec-centered power in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirie Stromberg.

Shang (c. 1600 – 1046 BCE) elites were expert manipulators of soundscape. The intimacy of the relationship between music and authority during Bronze Age China has been well established, bronze bells having served as crucial markers of status and political prestige. Before the codification of the ritual orchestra, however, and beyond the performance of "music" per se, soundscapes were defined by factors such as climate and local ecological context, by animals, by the noise of human activity at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Biggie. John Walden. Jaime Awe. Rafael Guerra. Julie Hoggarth.

The plaza held special significance to the ancient Maya, and across ancient Mesoamerica. In a reflection of Maya cosmological beliefs, the plaza was seen as a representation of, and a portal to the primordial sea, the watery underworld from which all things originate. This connection is evident in various ways throughout the region, from special dedicatory deposits to decorative architecture and iconography. This presentation explores that cosmological salience through the recent excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke John Murphy. Carly Ameen.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of past religions tend to fall into one of two camps: tightly-focused empirical examinations of a particular religious culture, or wide-ranging phenomenological studies divorced from any local context. Little scholarship engages with the middle ground of longue durée development in particular phenomena within the same geographic region or ecological niche....