Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante García. Nelly Robles.

This is an abstract from the "Avances en los estudios de la arquitectura de Monte Albán" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En los sistemas de escritura precolombina de Mesoamérica, la zapoteca se conoce principalmente por los diversos estudios realizados en el desciframiento de estelas, pintura mural y vasijas cerámicas que han permitido conocer importantes informaciones sobre las élites político-sociales, sus alianzas matrimoniales, rituales...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Camacho-Trejo.

This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexicas were one of the civilizations that achieved a striking power of acquisition during Postclassic Mesoamerica. Through trade routes reaching down to Central America, they were able to procure exotic materials and artifacts not accessible in the basin of Mexico. One of these exotic materials was flint, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cathy Costin.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although a shamanic component has long been recognized in Andean Formative cultures, recent research on Cupisnique (ca. 1200–900 BCE) ceramic iconography yields evidence for more varied, more prevalent, and much more far-reaching use of therapeutic and entheogenic substances during the early phases of Andean prehistory than has been previously...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Watts.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At ~160ka, roughly at the end of our African speciation, archaeologists identify a change from sporadic to habitual use of red ochre. This has been interpreted as primarily a pigment for decorating performers’ bodies during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Ryan. Rick Bury. Jon Picciuolo. Antoinette Padgett. Dan Reeves.

Although we now have highly technical equipment that allows analyses and observations of rock art in new ways, this should in no way diminish pursuing our personal sense of curiosity, ability to develop hypotheses out of hunches, and test those hypotheses as best we can, to discover layers of significance for a rock art site that no piece of equipment would ever be capable of detecting. One such area of inquiry is consideration of ephemeral, event-based ways rock art interplays with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Sherwood. Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

This presentation reports on a new rock art site from Kentucky, brought to the authors' attention by local citizens. Inside a large sandstone rockshelter, more than a dozen black pictographs show several anthropomorphic characters. These images bear distinctive features and regalia associated with the "Redhorn Cycle" hero narrative reported by Paul Radin in 1948 from his ethnographic work among the Ho-Chunk. The rock art from this "Morning House" strongly resembles well-known Mississippian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Creager.

The individual is often overlooked in reconstructions of ritual activity, particularly within constructed spaces, where the repetitious nature of ritual obscures the signature of individual variance. Ritual actions are attributed to a group, or community, even burials are not the action or pure representation of an individual. The identification of the individual within a ritual practice highlights the variance accepted within a culture. In this case study of Early Anglo-Saxon Britain,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. A. Gwynn Henderson.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Upon arriving as a visiting professor at the University of Kentucky in 1980, Tom Dillehay took an immediate interest in the mounds and geometric earthworks that dotted the Bluegrass landscape of central Kentucky. As he drove the country roads and walked the rolling hills around Lexington, Dillehay...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ulla Jaekel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the last few decades, the study of ancient backfilling processes at prehistoric sites has aroused research interest: besides the architectural features, the surrounding layer structure came into focus. A fundamental distinction is made between natural layers and deliberately applied material. In contrast to geological erosion or debris layers, the fill...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Martindale Johnson. Arlen Chase. Diane Chase.

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. Ceremonial life at Caracol, Belize can be assessed through a technological and contextual analysis of ritualized obsidian objects. These items are typically termed "obsidian eccentrics", although "ritualized obsidian" more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only J. Cristina Freiberger.

This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly fragmented ancestral remains are found throughout the Ancestral Puebloan region of the American Southwest (AD 800–1700). These human remains are often cut, burned, broken, disarticulated, and commingled. For the last 20 years, the narrative has been that these collections were burned to be eaten...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Rosa Figueroa.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 2008-2010, California State University, Los Angeles, working under the Western Belize Regional Cave Project directed by Jaime Awe, investigated Midnight Terror Cave (MTC) in the Cayo District of Belize. At present, MTC is best known for its large human osteological assemblage of over 10,000 bones, which is well documented in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Lindsay. Khachatur Meliksetian. Hripsime Gevorgyan. Laure Dussubieux. Erik Otárola-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For 25 years, the Archaeology and Geography of Ancient Transcaucasian Societies project (Project ArAGATS) has focused on the origins, regional-scale organization, and sociopolitical dynamics among LBA hillforts in northern Armenia. This paper presents preliminary results from a pilot study of mica...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti. Terry Powis. Norbert Stanchly.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the discovery of Stela 6 in the mid-1980s, the weathered remains of this Early Classic period carved stone monument continue to lie in the main plaza at Pacbitun, displaced in antiquity. Re-exposed in 2003, epigraphic analysis verified the monument’s AD 485 Long Count date—confirming it as one of the earliest carved stelae in the Maya lowlands—and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Rachel Horowitz.

This is an abstract from the "The Preclassic Landscape in the Mopan Valley, Belize" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mopan Valley Preclassic Project began a multiyear project at Las Ruinas de Arenal as part of a larger regional study of the Preclassic social and political landscape in the upper Belize River valley. New excavations of the site’s E Group complex and associated ball court have shed light on Preclassic ritual behavior at the site....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Johnston.

The relationship between Ireland and both Britain and continental Europe has often, both explicitly and implicitly, cast Ireland as either subsumed under the "British Isles" or as being "peripheral" to cultural life there and on the Continent. This terminology simultaneously ignores the unique aspects of Irish social and cultural life while suggesting that any study of culture there is not relevant to a broader understanding of the human experience. However, the archaeological record suggests a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Rich. Matthew Robb. David Freidel.

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. From the colossal heads of the Olmec to the severed head of the Maya Maize God in the Popol Vuh, the head and face have been of singular importance in Mesoamerican art and thought. If the human body is an axis mundi, the head and face give that axis a physical manifestation of individuality. A nexus of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erika Robles.

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. By analyzing the codices, ceramics, and pre-Hispanic sculpture, it is possible to identify different instruments employed both for the extraction of blood itself and for the sacrifice of victims. In these sources, maguey spines, bone awls, flint knives, and even the quadrangular stones where the victims...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carol Patterson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Runners have always played an important role in Pueblo life, as with all tribes in the Southwest. They carried messages and trade items across great distances between prehistoric villages. Ritual racing around villages and out to sacred shrines have served to inspire the clouds to bring rain and keep the Sun and Moon on track during their annual journeys. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leon Natker. Ramson Lomatewama.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Katsinam are an iconic symbol of the Native American southwest, but the origin of the religion, sometimes referred to as the Katsina cult, has been elusive. In this paper I review earlier research on the origin of the Katsina culture and the conclusions these researchers came to, taking into account the theoretical constructs and assumptions these earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maarten Jansen. Gabina Perez.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human sacrifice and cannibalism are hallmarks of colonial discourse, which was developed to justify the conquest of the Americas. Particularly Aztec worldview has been presented consistently as pivoting on human sacrifices to “bloodthirsty...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bretton Giles. Ryan Parish. Marta Alfonso Durruty. Bretton Giles.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our paper investigates the relationship between Ohio Hopewell ceremonial hearths and the caches interred within/adjacent to them in submound buildings at Hopewell and Mound City. While large Ohio Hopewell mega-caches have captured the attention of archaeologists, discussions of the ceremonial hearths associated with them have typically focused on their use....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Izumi Shimada. Carlos Elera. Haagen Klaus. Alexandra Greenwald. Jenna Hurtubise.

We present a multidisciplinary summary vision of the natural and cultural contexts and impacts of an 11th century mega-El Niño event and the extraordinary social responses to and consequences of it. Evidence and impacts of torrential rains and associated severe flooding dated ca. 1050 CE have been documented at multiple sites along the Peruvian coast, particularly in the Lambayeque region. The flood buried the Middle Sicán capital of Sicán with fluvial deposits 1.0 to 1.5 m thick. During this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Lorenza Lopez Mestas Camberos. Marisol Montejano Esquivias.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Las figurillas conocidas originalmente con el término genérico de "Cerro de García", se ubican cronológicamente entre los años 600 a 900 d.C. y son consideradas como una evidencia de interacción intra e interregional por su amplia distribución en el Occidente de México. Sin embargo, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rocío Jiménez González.

This is an abstract from the "The Palace of Xalla in Teotihuacan: A Possible Seat of Power in the Ancient Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Las figurillas cerámicas que muestran una gran diversidad de apariencias son testimonios silentes pero tangibles de las maniobras culturales de antaño. Podríamos decir que son un repositorio de memoria. En ellas se expresan ideas convencionalizadas durante un tiempo específico, lo que las vuelve un...