Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre. Diego Matadamas.

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. The offerings at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan contain several lithic artifacts that were miniature versions of ornaments, weapons and attire, which were used to produce religious images. For the Mexicas, the act of placing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

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. Mississippian and Oneota entanglements were often violent, typically resulting in intercommunity conflict, loss of life, and population displacement. However, Mississippians in the northern Lower Mississippi Valley may have comprised a sufficiently large territorial bloc to have successfully thwarted Oneota...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham. Juan Manuel Palomo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations in the Amoch Group of Ceibal, a minor ceremonial complex located outside of the site epicenter, have provided new insights into the transition from the Preceramic to the Middle Preclassic periods in the Maya lowlands (ca. 1000 BC). Previous investigations in the civic-ceremonial core of Ceibal revealed an E Group dating to around 950...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Rutecki.

Informed by ethnographic accounts, iconography has helped clarify how people materialized otherwise intangible aspects of their realities. In this paper, I examine the use of raccoons in imagery from Mississippian archaeological contexts. By considering placement of independent raccoon motifs in iconographic scenes, as well as raccoon motifs associated with figures, I identify use patterns of raccoon imagery. Considering these iconographic data alongside faunal data generated from Spiro,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erella Hovers. Anna Belfer-Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Harold Dibble had strong views about the cognitive abilities and symbolic behavior of premodern humans as he gleaned them from the archaeological record through engravings, ornaments, burials, etc. After publishing a number of papers touching on these issues, mostly in the 1990s, Dibble...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Messinger. Bryan Hanks. Nick Suarez. Marc Bermann. Claire Ebert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Preclassic (~1000 BC-AD 300) marked the appearance of increased socio-political integration and the emergence of inequality in the Maya lowlands. Over the course of the Preclassic, emerging elites invested in monumental construction projects and consolidated their ritual authority with ceremonial events, which occurred in large public plazas. As one of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Schaefer. Gabriel Prieto. John Verano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Child sacrifice has been practiced by many ancient societies over time although archaeological evidence is often lacking. Scholars have attempted to investigate the motivations behind intentional state-sanctioned killings; however, the missing archaeological context leaves these interpretations up for debate. Outside of modern-day Trujillo, recent excavations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Briggs. Heather Lapham.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Domestic pigs, first introduced to sixteenth-century Native Americans in the Southeast by Spanish entradas, provided a familiar and suitably European food source for colonists who settled the region. Over the next two to three centuries, local Indigenous cuisines also incorporated pig meat and fat, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Schurr. Madeleine McLeester.

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. In this session, we seek to reveal rituals that have been silenced and broaden our understandings of indigenous rituals in North American archaeology. The treatment of this topic requires a diverse set of perspectives due to its complexity as well as the ways that past rituals continue to reverberate in the present. Central to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Enrique Baquedano. Juan Luis Arsuaga. César Laplana. Belén Márquez. Rosa Huguet.

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. In the Des-Cubierta Cave, in the Central System Range of the Iberian Peninsula, 35 crania of large herbivores (Bison priscus, Bos primigenius, Cervus elaphus, and Stephanorhinus hemitoechus) were recovered in an area where the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Easley. Christine VanPool.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death exists at the cornerstone of every culture. Each culture has death rituals through which humans seek to control the unknown. These rituals may focus on the event of dying and “crossing over” as dictated by each culture, but also include the role the dead might play even after their bodily death. Archaeologists have focused on mortuary ritual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Borislava Simova.

Our understanding of the ancient Maya is informed to a great extent by the material remains of ritual performance in both domestic and public contexts. Maya populations throughout Mesoamerica were united by a shared cosmology patterning the timing, location, and material aspects of ritual performance. Yet, ritual was not a static or rigid construct, dutifully replicated across populations. At the site of Actuncan, Belize, we find that aspects of domestic ritual cycles, - including form, content,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saburo Sugiyama.

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. Intensive excavations carried out by the Proyecto Templo de Quetzalcoatl more than 20 years ago suggested that the pyramid symbolized human sacrifice, warfare, and rulership in Teotihuacan. The lack of a royal tomb inside the building indicated that more than 200 warriors were sacrificed in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Jolie. W. Rex Weeks.

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. Ethnographic, iconographic, and archaeological records attest to the sophisticated and sumptuous textiles produced by Maya peoples in ancient and contemporary times. However, historical neglect of cordage industries in archaeology, combined with poor organic preservation and gaps in the ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Bellorado.

This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancestral Pueblo people in southeastern Utah seem to have been obsessed with sandals and their depictions during the thirteenth century. Recent research has documented hundreds of sandal depictions on plaster and rock surfaces in the area dating to this period, but how should archaeologists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phyllis Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists studying the Maya have traditionally considered obsidian to be a luxury good that was often tightly controlled by the elite during the Classic period. Archaeological evidence from the Classic Maya capital of Tamarindito in Guatemala challenges these long-held assumptions, however. At Tamarindito, multiple lines of evidence support the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Avner Goldstein.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Oyster shells have been discovered across multiple sites in Britain, often as part of shell middens which have been interrupted almost exclusively as food refuse. But whether inland or by the sea, people in Britain had used oysters and other molluscs to help make their religion. Oyster shells...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Smith. Gudmundur Ólafsson.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic (SANNA 3.0): Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of 850 years, Surtshellir—a massive lava cave in western Iceland’s rugged interior—was variously described as a geological wonder, a shelter for outlaws, an abode of ghosts and spirits, a tourist's dream, a place of torture, the wilderness, an archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayc Sedlmayr. Martin Oliva.

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. Ethnohistoric sources show hunters burnt the bones of prey or hung them on trees, heaped them on piles, deposited them in bogs, etc., in order to propitiate nature spirits such as the “Master of Animals” for game resurrection...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guilhem Olivier. Vera Tiesler.

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. Beyond the general idea of benefiting society and placating the divine, the polyvalent symbols and meanings of ancient religious sacrifices can be interpreted properly only after combining different disciplinary lenses. In this paper, we scrutinize iconographic and ethnohistorical testimonies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hannah Mattson. Jacque Kocer.

In the late 1890s, the Hyde Exploring Expedition collected over 650 finished ornaments from Room 28 in Pueblo Bonito. UNM’s recent re-excavation of the room, including material derived from backdirt from adjacent rooms as well as intact floor and subfloor deposits, produced thousands of additional ornaments and pieces of lapidary debris. This paper presents the results of the analysis of this combined assemblage and discusses its significance in relation to ornaments found in other portions of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonio Marín Calvo. Diego Matadamas-Gomora.

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. It is well-known that autosacrifice was a common practice among Mesoamerican societies since at least the Middle Formative period (ca. 900–300 BC). Iconography suggests that elites offered their blood and did penance to contact with the sacred realm. However, ethnohistoric evidence reveals that this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Batres. Neil Duncan. Lana Williams. Brigitte Kovacevich. Michael Callaghan.

This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Maya, plant-based foods were not just important for sustenance but also had ritual meaning, especially emphasized when placed in graves and caches. Food offered during ritual performances created a reciprocal relationship between living individuals, their ancestors, and the gods. This paper presents the paleoethnobotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pablo Arias.

Caves provide a privileged context for the study of Prehistoric ritual activity. Inside them, we enjoy the unique possibility of directly observing and analyzing spatial features that have hardly changed (and in some cases have not changed at all) since the Paleolithic. However, the poor preservation of the archaeological evidence during the earliest years of the research, and particularly the enormous cultural gap between the Paleolithic codes and systems of beliefs and the modern observers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Levi. Christian Sheumaker. Sarah Boudreaux.

The ancient Maya community of Wari Camp was organized into a quincunx pattern of four quarters delineated by the intersection of two inter-cardinal alignments. One was formed by a series of "temple-on-the-east" groups running northwest to southeast. The other consisted of a massive, northeast-to-southwest trending drainage modified for foot traffic. At their intersection stood an uncarved stela. Other stelae marked crossroads, while pairs of temple groups stood at entrances into the drainage...