Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aj Xol Ch'ok Hector Rolando. Mauricio Diaz Garcia.

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. En el contexto de pueblos invadidos y luego brutalmente colonizados en los territorios que conforman la actual República de Guatemala, las mujeres mayas juegan un papel fundamental en la preservación, transmisión y radicalismo de la cultura. Las mujeres mayas son las constructoras y guardianas del pensamiento, idiomas, valores, filosofías y...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jie Shen.

This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Oracle bone divination, an ancient East Asian practice for predicting the future, originated in northwestern China during the middle Neolithic period (5000–3000 BCE) and ultimately became a prominent ritual during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Its influence reached the Korean Peninsula and Japanese archipelago around 500 BC, potentially...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Valdez.

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. One of the outstanding traits of the Mayo Chinchipe – Marañón culture is the spiral architecture that appears on the mound terraces of at least two major sites of the upper Amazon. In one of them, the vortex of the spiral was a ceremonial hearth that contained a votive cache in its base. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kurt F. Anschuetz. Richard I. Ford.

Agriculture among the northern Southwest’s Pueblo communities traditionally and historically was more than merely an economic activity through which the people "made their living." Steeped in ritual and informed by principles of stewardship, spiritual ecology, and ensoulment that explicate their orientation within the Natural World and their obligations to the Supernatural World, indigenous agricultural practice was literally and figuratively a key element in each individual’s everyday...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Polly and Curtis Schaafma have been instrumental in identifying primary archaeological tenets associated with the origin of the Pueblo Kachina Cult. In this paper I revisit key ethnohistorical and archaeological findings of the origins of the Pueblo Kachina Cult and "Snake Dance" (Tsu’tiki or Tsu’tiva). Utilizing a comparative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelsey Sullivan. Jaime Awe.

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. Though identified at sites throughout Mesoamerica and the Maya Lowlands, eccentric lithics remain poorly understood and understudied. These esoteric artifacts, however, are very important to understanding the ritual expression of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Wright. Nathalie Brusgaard.

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. The far-western Southwest presents a landscape of wide, once-perennial rivers cutting through a xeric terrain of lava plains and mountain peaks. For the Yuman-speaking tribes tethered to the waterways, this landscape is both physical and metaphysical, in that it is simultaneously the place where people, animals, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arturo Pascual Soto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El período Epiclásico en El Tajín, Veracruz, como en buena parte del litoral norte del Golfo de México, se encuentra marcado por una profunda transformación ideológica y por el surgimiento de una clase gobernante que habrá de exaltar los atributos propios de los guerreros. El Complejo Arquitectónico del Edificio de las Columnas, construido en el punto más alto...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler.

In Mesoamerica, sacrificial ceremonies for the sake of religious merit-making tended to bridge polarities between action and symbols. Some of the ritual practices were mediated by mythical narratives surrounding domestic hearths, divine fire, and the sun itself. Among ancient Mesoamericans with their hierophagic cosmic understanding, the fiery protagonists to which sacrifices were destined to were deemed necessary complements of all life and had to be fed. This talk combines graphic and textual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pauline Clauwaerts.

After more than twenty years of investigations, the San José de Moro Archaeological Project has found a total of seven funerary chambers pertaining to the Late Moche "priestesses" (AD 600-850) in one of the most important ceremonial centres and cemeteries located on the North coast of Peru. The sudden appearance of that specific character is echoed in the sacred imagery where the priestess is depicted, as a supernatural women enacting in complex ritual activities with other elite characters....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Michael Coe’s “The Maya Scribe and His World” (1973) and the 1971 Grolier Club exhibition for which it was produced marked the first sustained treatment of scribes and artists in scholarship on Classic Maya civilization. It also highlighted the wealth of information that ceramics and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. Jayc Sedlmayr.

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 many societies, human bodily parts and substances have been seen as symbolically significant and imbued with spiritual power. Over the years, several scholars have recognized the importance of these bodily parts and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Greaves. Karen Kramer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We investigate the pro-sociality of frequent cultural dances among a group of South American hunter-gatherers living in an impoverished environment. Savanna Pumé foragers of the llanos of Venezuela hold 11-hr night dances 36% of all nights sampled during 30 months of ethnoarcheological fieldwork. The Savanna Pumé live in a hyperseasonal environment with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Raiza Rivera.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water is an element which characterizes and links Southeast Asia, however, due to the difficulties of understanding its religious significance within the archaeological record, few studies have examined its symbolic meaning. As part of this ethnoarchaeology study, interviews and observations conducted in ten traditional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Whitley.

This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Salinan Tribe occupied territory extending from the California’s Salinas Valley across the Santa Lucia/Central Coast Ranges to the Pacific coast. Although poorly known, they created a small but important corpus of rock paintings. Even less well-known is the ethnographic record on these pictographs. This includes a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anaïs Pochon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the French colonization, Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley in general, were the background of a quantity of testimonies about Native American societies that were met at the time by the French explorers. A few of these Frenchmen had lived among Native American societies for a various amount of time, the most noticeable example being probably...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Cabrera Romero.

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. What was daily life like after sundown in the ancient city of Wari, Peru? What events took place and who was involved in them? In this paper, activities of the night and the sacred rituals that occurred in the ancient capital of the Wari Empire are explored from evidence that denotes the advanced practice of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Redmond.

Much past research on the development of Archaic ideological complexity in eastern North America has focused primarily on ritualism and ceremony related to mortuary behaviors. Less attention has been given to ritualism within what is commonly thought of as domestic contexts and without overt mortuary ceremonialism or monumental architecture. The recent discovery of puddled clay architecture (floors) and associated features at the Burrell Orchard site (33LN15) in northeast Ohio provides new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melina García Hernández. Takeshi Inomata. Daniela Triadan.

This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Aguada Fénix is a major ceremonial complex from the Middle Formative Usumacinta (MFU) assemblage that was discovered in Tabasco, Mexico, through lidar technology. The construction of this complex indicates the importance of communal labor, and there is no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Hill.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This work considers the implications of human-animal relationships as they are found in the mortuary record of Verulamium- modern town of St. Albans, England. Once considered to be a major center, the mortuary rites given to its people suggest high variability in the role specific animal species played within the living and death culture of the city. While 480...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Elliott. Grégory Pereira.

This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of ritual activities often focus on paraphernalia, architectural structures, and other aspects of performance. While these are all important features, other more subtle elements that are nevertheless crucial to these activities are often not considered in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Breault. Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous research on feasting in antiquity has demonstrated the importance of surface appearance and vessel form to interpret the performative aspects of rituals such as feasts. As part of the hosts’ strategies, of particular importance are vessels that invoke exotic imagery and/or outside groups through iconography and or aspects of overall vessel design....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dove.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although most archaeologists agree that large-scale feasting occurred in the prehistoric Southwest, excavations have produced little direct evidence for it. Villages where feasting has been asserted had large populations, public architecture (monumental buildings, shrines, plazas, etc.), and often deep antiquity. Recent excavations at two such sites in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brea McCauley. Mark Collard.

This is an abstract from the "Body Modification: Examples and Explanations" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To many people in the West, the idea that finger amputation would be carried out for nonmedical reasons is unheard of. However, recent studies suggest that it may have been quite common in the past. The aim of the study presented here was to shed some light on the prevalence of finger amputation customs. To accomplish this, we examined...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Adler.

Ash deposits are commonly associated with site disuse and termination deposits across the Ancestral Pueblo region of the American Southwest. This paper contextualizes the use of fire, and fire-related products, as part of a larger suite of practices employed to protect past, present and future occupants of villages from malevolent "others" across the pre-colonial northern Rio Grande region.