Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Purcell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horseshoe Mesa (WS834) in the Ancestral Puebloan Crack-in-Rock Community of Wupatki National Monument, Arizona, has three petroglyph panels that mark important solar events. Timelapse cameras documented the daily patterns of these interactions from September 2016 to March 2018 at two of the panels. Panel 39 uses carefully placed petroglyph elements to interact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

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. Located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, the Early Classic site of Los Horcones is known for being an important gateway community where goods and ideas are distributed. Teotihuacano merchants established a strong presence that included exchanges of commodities and ideas. In this presentation, I would like to look more closely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chrissina C. Burke. Katie K. Tappan. Gavin B. Wisner. Julie Hoggarth. J. Britt Davis.

Deciphering middens, feasting, ritual, or terminal deposits in the Maya world requires an evaluation of faunal remains. Maya archaeologists have been and continue to evaluate other artifacts classes, but often simply offer NISP values for skeletal elements recovered from these deposits. To further understand their archaeological significance, we analyzed faunal materials from deposits at the sites of Baking Pot and Xunantunich in the Upper Belize River Valley. We identified the species, bone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Taylor Lawhon. David Mixter.

In 2012, excavations were conducted within a Late Classic noble palace at the ancient Maya site of Actuncan, located in western Belize. Remains of a large deposit of Terminal Classic materials were recovered from a corner of the palace’s primary courtyard. Based on its location on the courtyard surface and below collapse, the deposit was assumed to date to the period of the palace’s abandonment. The placement of this deposit was contemporary with Actuncan’s 9th-century renaissance as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Ruiz. Viridiana Guzmán Torres. Emiliano Melgar Tísoc.

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. El sacrificio humano por medio del acceso de toracotomía bilateral transversa es una práctica ritual poco documentada a nivel osteológico en el área maya. En el presente trabajo se muestra a nivel microscópico y macroscópico tal evidencia, así como el tratamiento que se les dio a las victimas posterior al...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uriel Sánchez Sosa. Leobardo Pacheco Arias.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an investigation on how the transformations of rituals and spaces linked to ancestors have occurred in San Pablo Villa de Mitla, Oaxaca, from the Late Postclassic to the present. The spaces known as the Grupo de la Iglesia and Grupo del Calvario are addressed, both with antecedents from prehispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendoza.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copalli (copal) is an aromatic tree resin and a central figure in Mesoamerican ceremonies. Produced from various species of the Bursera genus, copalli is understood as the blood of trees and can be molded into figures or burned into thick...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Jaime Awe. Gyles Iannone. Nilesh Gaikwad.

While absorbed residues are widely used to explore subsistence-related questions, more recent work has used them to examine the use of elite and ritual beverages. In this paper, we explore absorbed residues found in ceramic containers and bone tubes recovered from caves, burials, and caches in the Belize Valley. The ceramic vessels presumably held liquids consumed or otherwise used in rituals in these settings, while the bone tubes delivered substances to participants in those rituals as enemas....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Gazzo. Fabio Negrino. Julien Riel-Salvatore.

This is an abstract from the "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology of Liguria: Recent Research and Insights" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Personal ornaments are commonly attributed to a modern human dispersal in western Asia and Europe, representing a veritable key tool for understanding the human dispersal out of Africa. Objects loaded with symbolic meaning such as beads made from modified marine shells were largely used during the Upper Paleolithic in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Parker. George J. Bey III. Tomás Gallareta Negrón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade tadpole spoons and clamshell pendants represent some of the most symbolically charged items of wealth and power in formative Mesoamerica. The Tzimin jades are a newly discovered cache of these items from the Middle Preclassic (900 BC—350 BC) Maya village of Paso del Macho that offer additional context for assessing the function and significance of jade...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Mazzetto.

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. Sixteenth-century written sources, codices, and archaeological findings from the Templo Mayor Project have provided historians and archaeologists good tools for the study of instruments used for sacrifice and self-sacrifice among the ancient Nahuas. Frequently found among them are flint knives, maguey...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many species of plants are named in the mythical narratives of the Popol Wuj. The sixteenth-century text from the K’iche’ of highland Guatemala describes how the gods and the first people used wild and cultivated plants and plant-derived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

The National Museum of the American Indian holds a lot of Mesoamerican mosaic encrusted wooden masks and shields bought in 1921 from Carl A. Purpus, who stated they were found in a cave near Acatlán, Puebla (Mexico). The presentation, besides including a brief description of the artifacts, it is aimed at reconstructing the objects’ unknown contextual information through a comparison with similar objects held in American, Mexican and European museums, some of them proceeding from scientifically...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Erauw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent decades, zooarchaeological studies have been increasing in South America. Nevertheless, combining the methods used to understand some questions related to animal and human interactions in ancient Peru seems crucial. In this paper, we will present the first results of an ongoing multidisciplinary project focused on the central coast of Peru during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Muntz.

This research entails the thorough analysis and comparison of two ceramic assemblages to understand whether and how ritual manifests in pottery of the Late Mississippian Southeast. The study focuses on ritual phenomena exhibited at two Late Mississippian Period (ca. late 1200s A.D. to A.D. 1500) settlements in southern Illinois, the Millstone Bluff site in Pope County (11Pp3) and the Dillow’s Ridge site in Union County (11U635). Millstone Bluff has been interpreted as a site of public ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Walter Burgos Morakawa. Brent Woodfill.

The Candelaria Caves System, with its approximately 18 km of passageways, forms the second largest underground karstic complex in the Maya Area. As result of their location at the highland-lowland transition and close to Great Western Trade Route, it was an important pilgrimage center for people of different cultural and geographical regions. The Early Classic period (A.D. 250-500) marked the introduction of polychrome ceramics, mainly Dos Arroyos-group ceramics, which played an important role...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kerchusky. Corina Kellner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Myriad factors shaped cultural practices such as ‘trophy head’ taking in Andean prehistory. Zorropata, located in the Las Trancas Valley, Nasca, Peru, was a large domestic site with likely ceremonial function occupied relatively continuously from the Late Nasca period (c. AD 450-600) until the early Middle Horizon/Loro period (c. AD 600-1000). Archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Gillaspie. Julie Hoggarth. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project is an archaeological field school operating in the Cayo District of Western Belize and has excavated at multiple sites in Belize annually since 1988. In the past five years, the project has focused on excavation of peri-abandonment deposits, or deposits of artifacts built up during and after the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Romih.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The BVAR project has been investigating peri-abandonment deposits, also known as problematic or terminal deposits, at sites located along the Belize River in Western Belize. These investigations have focused on understanding the formation of such deposits as well as their significance across sites in the Belize Valley region. The project has employed a new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Romih. Rafael A. Guerra.

The BVAR project recently renewed its investigations of peri-abandonment deposits at several sites along the Belize River in Western Belize. Also referred to as de facto refuse and problematic or sheet-like deposits, these cultural remains are predominantly recovered in palace rooms and courtyards in site cores across the Maya lowlands. The purpose of the BVAR investigations is to better understand the formation of such deposits as well as their temporal and spatial significance across sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. David Maxwell. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Handprints with missing fingers occur at a number of Upper Palaeolithic rock art sites in Europe. It has been argued that they represent hand signals or a counting system, but there are reasons to believe that they were actually produced by individuals whose fingers had been amputated. Here, we report a cross-cultural study that was designed to shed light on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations and geospatial analyses of outlying residential settlement at Ceibal, Guatemala, shed light on the relationships between ritual and urbanization during the Preclassic period. The site epicenter, which consists of an E-Group assemblage carved out of bedrock, was established around...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rocio Velasco Fuentes. Marisol Reyes Lezama. Mayra León Santiago. Everardo Tapia Mendoza.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nopiloa y El Zapotal se localizan en una sub área cultural conocida como la Mixtequilla, en el estado de Veracruz, México. Durante las excavaciones, realizadas en los años 1940s y 1970s, en ambos lugares se recuperaron varios sahumadores y braseros, objetos cerámicos relacionados a prácticas rituales, en lo que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Caretta. Finn Ole Nielsen. Michael Thorsen. Poul Otto Nielsen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Vasagård site is located on the southern side of the island of Bornholm, Denmark. Vasagård is separated by the 100m Læså valley from two nearly identical Neolithic sites and consists of a tomb system where a dolmen and a passage grave can be found close to the settlement. The grave system and causewayed enclosures are dated from 3500 BC., and constitute the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Winters. Rossana May. George Bey III.

This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the PARB project’s 2023 excavations of the Terminal Classic (AD 800–1000) Grupo Kuche palace throne room (N1050E0815) at Kiuic, we unearthed two major and distinct ritual offerings. The first was thought to be a lip-to-lip cache located on the northwest corner near the top of the structure beneath a...