Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Elena Vega-Villalobos. Ana Garcia Barrios. Alejandra Martinez de Velasco.

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. Durante el periodo Clásico se esculpieron dinteles y estelas donde algunas mujeres de sitios específicos desempeñaron un papel relevante en las ceremonias de final de periodo. Así lo atestiguan inscripciones de varias ciudades del Usumacinta y de la región de Petén, entorno geográfico en el que se centrará nuestro trabajo. La escritura...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Kwoka.

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. During the Late Classic, lithic artifacts, including eccentrics, served as the primary elements of many Lowland Maya caches. Despite this general pattern, technological and iconographic analyses illuminate the distinct character of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Billie Follensbee.

This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While only small fragments of actual cordage have been recovered in Gulf Coast Olmec excavations, depictions of cordage figure prominently in Olmec and Olmec-related art. Reliefs of string, rope, and knots appear as costume components on Colossal Heads, on figures in the round, and in relief images on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Bria.

This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have long considered how the use of ritual hearths in early Andean temples, specifically those part of the Kotosh Religious Tradition, was central to early complex social practices in highland Peru. But what is the legacy of hearths as ritual spaces, objects, and tools for the transformation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindi Masur. Giles Morrow.

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sector B, the principal monumental area of Huaca Colorada, has long been understood as the locus of rites of social and cosmic rebirth, ancestor veneration, and genealogical continuity. Excavation has revealed a ritual canon that included the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Anderson.

This paper investigates how parallels were drawn between lions and human in Bronze Age Crete, and how this parallelism potentially developed concurrently through material culture worn on the human body and oral narrative. I argue that the unique qualities of seal stones, namely their close association with human identity and their physical location on the human body, positioned them to be potent venues for asserting parallels between man and beast. I begin in the late Early Bronze Age, with a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Cueva de los Quetzales was initially reported in 1991 by the Petexbatun Regional Cave Survey and more intensively investigated in 1993 in conjunction with the Altas Arquqológico de Guatemala’s excavation of the surface site of Las Pacayas. The site is located 12 km south of Dos Pilas and 7.5 km east of Aguateca. The cave is noteworthy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Kassabaum. Alexandria Mitchem.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The role of non-food plants in human history is a growing area of research for paleoethnobotanists. In this paper, we develop and present a multi-pronged method for exploring non-subsistence human-plant interactions in the archaeological record, using a case study from the American Southeast. The archaeological record of the Lower Mississippi Valley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Strong.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the modern abundance of artificial light, it is often assumed that ancient cultures had the means and desire to illuminate the night. The paucity of artificial lighting devices from ancient Egypt challenges this assumption and has led scholars to conclude that the evidence must be there, but earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raúl Valadez Azúa. Bernardo Rodríguez Galicia.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Derivado del proyecto arqueológico “Estudio de túneles y Cuevas en Teotihuacan” es una colección de 455 cánidos que fueron estudiados para conocer su diversidad y la forma como interactuaron estos animales con los hombres en las diversas épocas (siglos VII-XX). En la colección fueron reconocidos perros comunes, xoloitzcuintles, híbridos de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alondra Trejo Ordoz. Oswaldo Camarillo Sánchez.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los cráneos decorados de nueve hombres y una mujer del México Antiguo atestiguan una compleja red social y cultural que trasciende hasta nuestros días. Al no contar con un registro arqueológico de su hallazgo, los análisis óseos, dentales, gráficos, de manufactura, tafonómicos y arqueométricos, son valiosos puentes de conocimiento que permiten...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Crown. Patrick D. Lyons.

This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the highest concentrations of macaws and parrots in the US Southwest was recovered from four sites in the mountains of east-central Arizona: Grasshopper, Kinishba, Point of Pines, and Turkey Creek Pueblos. This study reexamines the evidence for acquisition, care, and discard of the birds...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Blanton.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Religious traditions follow historical trajectories. Within the archaeological record, processes of cosmological reorientation may be signaled by patterned change in attendant ritual paraphernalia. This kind of evolutionary process may be tracked in the American Southeast among certain late prehistoric, Mississippian societies, specifically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Bever.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most common forms of divination in early modern Europe was magical treasure hunting. In an era before banks, locks, and police were common, people often buried or hid valuables, and sometimes knowledge of the location was lost. Some people later stumbled upon these caches accidentally, but others sought them out. Some treasure hunters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya places were dynamic assemblages of people, the things that they made and used, and myriad material and immaterial affordances. Unfortunately, a simple enumeration of their components cannot account for the historical valence carried by places. In northwestern Belize, the multi-scalar operation of ritual may help clarify...

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 Alejandro Garay Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Maya of northwestern Guatemala, modern populations continue to use the mountains found in their territories as places of worship. Often altars are located directly on the peaks of hills and mountains, while in other cases they are found on pilgrimage routes in or around these high sacred points, such as on the...

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 Terje Oestigaard.

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. Although cannibalism is a contested theme in anthropology, there is one area and era that has received little attention: Scandinavian folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widely documented practices...

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...