Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the tumultuous Epiclassic period (AD 600-900), several smaller polities in Central Mexico and the Gulf Coast rose to prominence in the wake of the collapsed metropolis of Teotihuacan. Although this period is often characterized by rampant militarism, wide-ranging economic activities,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alan Sandstrom.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Flowers are a central feature of religious rituals among today's Nahua of the southern Huasteca. They are associated with the sun, growing corn, life-giving water, the bounty of the living cosmos, and ancestors who visit their relatives during Day of the Dead. For the Nahua, flowers are far...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Crown. Christopher 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. Bird species found in archaeological contexts throughout Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, include a range of local and non-local birds, as well as game and non-game birds. We analyzed the set of 5,350 identified bird bones and compared species composition to the local and regional avifaunas that we expect to have occurred ~1000...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rock Art Documentation, Research, and Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A core principle of professional archaeology is the preservation and consideration of context. For studies of rock imagery, this necessitates documenting the context of panels in relationship to the larger cultural landscape. Using landscape theory, I assess the placement of petroglyphs and pictographs at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Oliver.

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. This paper makes the case for a greater concerted effort in archaeobotany to give equal standing to the domain of 'food' for the soul and spirit, that is, useful/edible plants for the well-being of the individual and the community in the past. All too often, the emphasis falls into concerns of staple food as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yue Fu. Na An. Xujing Gao. Zi Shi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Zanthoxylum bungeanum, a vital component of ancient Chinese culinary life, has been unearthed from many tombs associated with the Chu state. As a prominent funerary offering, it is presumed to hold distinct roles and functions within the burial context. The presence of Zanthoxylum bungeanum alongside various fruit remains underscores its multifaceted...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foreign influence was a major component at Teotihuacan from very early on and throughout Teotihuacan’s history. Extensive archaeological research notes Teotihuacan as a religious center and the largest Classic Mesoamerican city with multiethnic apartment compounds and neighborhoods. However, the impact of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ventura Pérez.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our scientific perspectives of the world are bound to moments of clarity. Clarity comes from the realization that the questions worth asking are the ones that illuminate the human experience while understanding positionality and privilege in the exploration of those questions. As an MA student, Dr. Martin encouraged me to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Poister. Lilly Buckley Vargas. Holley Moyes.

The most common artifacts found in Maya caves are unslipped and monochrome slipped ceramic sherds. The smashing of ceramic vessels as an element of ritual practice is recorded ethnographically among some twentieth-century Maya groups. Other Maya groups have been documented collecting sherds from domestic middens and depositing them at sacred sites. If caves were venues for the former type of behavior in antiquity, one would expect to find a high percentage of refitting sherds in their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeremy Kulisheck. Blair Mills.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent fieldwork in the southern and southeastern foothills of the San Mateo Mountains of south-central New Mexico has identified caves, rockshelters, rock art, non-standard settlements, and shrines and other ritual architecture located on hilltops. These finds reveal a landscape of rich cosmological significance to ancestral Pueblo Mimbres and Jornada...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A simulation model of Teotihuacan’s hypothetical collective government has shown that a highly distributed network of leaders could have been effective at ensuring social coordination in the city by means of consensus formation. The model makes a strong prediction: it indicates that this collective mode of government would have been most effective in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Elizabeth Ibarrola.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the inception of the field of Historical Archaeology, much has been made of the small finds interpreted as residues of African spiritual belief and ritual practice. Beads, X-marked fragments, and pierced coins, first the subject of the “search for Africanisms” which characterized American plantation archaeology, have since been examined as evidence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelda Issa Marengo. José Osorio León. Francisco Pérez Ruíz.

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. Human skeletal assemblages from Chichen Itza and its surrounding regions are complex, which makes Chichen Itza a prime location to study mortuary practices. The complexity stems most likely from Chichen Itza’s multicultural relationships with other groups not only within the Yucatán Peninsula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Huifa Yan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Warring States Period has been regarded as an essential period in terms of the transition of political structure. This transition leaves its influence on the forms of burials and tombs. This study aims to provide a new perspective on the political transition by studying the changes of remains of the elite tombs of Chu State during the Warring State Period....

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Rick. Erick Acero Shapiama. Rosa Rick.

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2019 a new gallery was detected by the Programa de Investigación Arqueológico y Conservación en Chavín de Huántar in Chavin’s Building D, which was explored in 2022 and excavated in 2023. Named for a sculptural stone vessel depicting a condor left during gallery closure, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Howey.

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. The Midewiwin is a ceremonial complex whose importance among the Algonquin-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes Region was noted frequently throughout the historical era. Various scholars have interpreted this ceremonial complex as an exclusively post-contact phenomenon, as a medicine society that evolved in relation to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Chen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burial practices provide important evidence for understanding the social and symbolic connections between the dead and the living. The presentation of artifacts in burials and their functions can provide crucial information of meanings in ritual practices. In this study, I apply use-wear analysis and residue analysis to a sample of grinding stones,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nerissa Russell.

Dogs often occupy a spiritually ambiguous position in human-animal relations. Domestic but not livestock, they typically share human space and diet more than most herd animals. They are more likely to be considered persons, with souls – a trait they share with wild animals. Here I examine the spiritual status of dogs in early Near Eastern herding societies, as livestock-keeping spread through the region and it became possible to situate dogs in relation to other domestic animals as well as wild...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler. Guilhem Olivier.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this talk, we shall analyze sacrificial knives in Mesoamerica’s (bio) archaeological record, among written sources, and iconography. Our survey emphasizes the diversity of cutting weaponry through time and cultural spheres. By combining forensic evidence with the material study of sacrificial knives,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Mistretta. Michelle LeFebvre.

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. Food is a biological necessity, but it is also created and used through culturally defined practices and perceptions, including capture, cultivation, and/or collection, preparation, consumption, disposal, and even secondary deposition. This paper challenges us to think more critically about how we identify,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler. Virginia Miller.

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. Among late Maya religious complexes, Chichen Itza stands as a monumental landmark. Among the enigmatic aspects of Chichen’s ceremonial innovations count skull racks, where the heads of sacrificed victims were exhibited in rows. It was the first Mesoamerican city to erect a permanent, decorated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kalei Oliver. Rebecca Bria.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of ancient hilltop constructions across Peru have revealed how ancient Andean people, often during the so-called “intermediate periods,” protected and defended their village spaces in times of interregional warfare and political balkanization. In the north-central highlands of Ancash, Peru, numerous studies have revealed that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Maxwell.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mayan communities are located within sacred space. Each town has four principal guardians roughly aligned with cardinal directions and, in precontact times, a central altar. Each of the guardians is associated with a landmark (an escarpment, a cave/overhang, a spring or stream, a mountain) and embodies the energy of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bret Ruby. Friedrich Lueth. Rainer Komp. Jarrod Burks. Timothy Darvill.

This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monumental timber post circles or "woodhenges" are ancient and enduring elements in the ritual landscapes of Native North America. Examples are known from as much as 3500 years ago at Poverty Point; from 2400 years ago in Adena ceremonial contexts in the Ohio Valley; from 1000 years ago at Cahokia; and in contemporary use...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Wallace. 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. For well over a millennium, Hohokam communities in the southern Southwest dwelled in a terrain of perennial river valleys fringed by a horizon of jagged mountains. Villages and livelihoods were nestled on the valley floors near the rivers, leaving the uplands as an uninhabited periphery between the everyday experience...