Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Crowley.

Activities at large ceremonial complexes are interpreted as regional community endeavors that form group identities and reify social and political structures. Imposing monuments such as Dún Ailinne, Navan Fort, and Rathcrogan have provided tantalizing glimpses into ritual and ceremonial performances of the Irish Iron Age (500 BC-AD 500). Communal feasting has been suggested to be a key practice at these sites during the later periods of use. At feasts, social structure and identity are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning in the 1980s, researchers noticed that some monumental avenues in the Chaco World (ca. AD 800-1200) of the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest were “roads through time” linking non-contemporaneous sites. These so-called “time bridges” are often interpreted as monuments built by later generations to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Shephard. Martin Gallivan.

Seventeenth-century colonial chroniclers repeatedly mention a series of places and objects that surrounded political negotiations and efforts at alliance-building by Powhatan societies. While regional scholarship has focused on competition over subsistence resources, regional trade dynamics, and the regulated exchange of "prestige goods" as central to the development of these political structures, we shift the focus toward the engagement between these societies and specific places and objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only João Zilhão.

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. The Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition is a watershed. By the later Upper Paleolithic, all continents were occupied, all the world’s ecosystems were exploited, and all aspects of ethnographically observed hunter-gatherer culture the archaeological record can preserve are indeed found. Prior to about 100,000 years...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron McNeil. Edy Barrios. Mauricio Díaz García. Agapito Carballo. Samuel Pinto.

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. This paper explores evidence of women’s ritual practice at Río Amarillo, a site located 20 km from the Classic period center of Copan. While the ritual activities of royal women are largely hidden from view in Copan’s Acropolis, excavations at the site of Río Amarillo and in the groups surrounding it uncovered two contexts that were particularly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Skousen.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pilgrimage centers and shrines are persistent places due in large part to spiritual magnetism, defined as the power of a place of pilgrimage to attract devotees. Most scholars, following James Prestons’ original treatment of the term, believe spiritual magnetism comes from and is conferred by humans based on cultural,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Anna Novotny. Brett Houk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary customs and monumental architecture in the Maya Region are viewed by archaeologists as markers of social status and complexity. The intersection of mortuary rituals and the built environment gives us a window through which to understand the development of social complexity. Excavations at Chan Chich, a medium-sized city located in northwest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Aiuvalasit.

Across cultures, the ritual use of water is nearly ubiquitous, yet most archaeological studies of water focus primarily on its socio-economic importance. The large (~200-1500 person) mesa-top Ancestral Pueblo (AD 1100-1700) villages of the Jemez Mountains, New Mexico are particularly good contexts for the archaeological study of water because small water storage features, often referred to as reservoirs, are found at many villages across the region. Alternative hypotheses for feature function,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Mathiowetz.

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In his seminal article on Andean plazas, Jerry Moore (1996) characterized plazas as spaces that serve as a setting for diverse public interactions, including as arenas that help to structure verbal and nonverbal ritual communication in the context of ritually infused power dynamics. In the Puebloan and Mogollon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch.

This is an abstract from the "The Rollout Keepers: Papers on Maya Ceramic Texts, Scenes, and Styles in Honor of Justin and Barbara Kerr" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carved along the exterior of a cylinder vase [K6511], two waterfowl grip flailing fish with their beaks. These fishing fowl occur again on polychrome pots, effigy bowls, censer stands, and modeled stucco friezes. Numerous examples of the “Waterbird Theme” came to light through the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Wolff.

Whole ceramic vessels and sherds incised after firing are known from Middle Horizon sites in the Wari heartland and periphery, associated with offering, burial and ceramic production contexts. Incisions include a wide variety of forms and have been interpreted as graffiti, makers or owners marks, and score marks to control breakage. The presence and forms of post-fired incisions were recorded during inventory of all ceramics excavated at Huari by the Huari Urban Prehistory Program in 2017. Their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Lorenz. Ana Margarida Moço. Rachel Holland. Rui Mataloto. Brandon Lewis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Freixo Archaeology Project was initiated in 2015 to investigate the nature of Roman Imperial occupation in the Iberian Peninsula with an interest in the symbolic and ideological reuse of sacred space. Freixo is located within the Municipality of Redondo in southeastern Portugal, where a sixteenth-century Christian church overlays an ancient Roman...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Prout.

Two chambers in Midnight Terror Cave, Belize show undeniable evidence of Maya child sacrifice. Operation V and Operation VIII are the deepest darkest chambers of the cave where some of the most important of ancient Maya rites were performed including human sacrifice. In 2009 Ann Scott proposed that sacrifices occurred in Operation VIII and, during ritual cleaning of this public space in preparation for a new ceremony, the bones were taken from their primary deposition site and moved to Operation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvia Rodríguez. Aaron Wright.

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 idea of a sacralized landscape is popularly associated with site-specific Native American religious beliefs and practices, but a landscape and its features can have religious meaning for other people as well. This paper examines the northern New Mexican folk-Catholic tradition of religious procession. Processions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Axel Nielsen.

How do prophecy and new religious movements impact life histories of artifacts and architecture? Ethnographic evidence indicates that prophets realize their visions, in part, by transforming relationships between people and material objects. They shun, embrace, or reorient technologies, artifacts, and architecture. Not surprisingly, in cultures where spiritual forces already animate artifacts and architecture, such reorganizations can produce dramatic changes in material culture. Much of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Buck Woodard. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popularly known as “Powhatan’s Mantle,” the shell-decorated and sewn animal skins are an iconic object of material culture from seventeenth-century Virginia. On display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, we argue that the Mantle’s provenance and possible links to Indigenous cosmology have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Reitz.

The Irene site (ca. AD 1150 - 1450) was a small, prestigious community occupied by a chief and his lineage. It was located on the Savannah River, a few kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The presence of animals rare in the region and animals rare or absent in other coastal assemblages distinguishes the Irene collection from other tidewater collections. Many of these animals exhibit atypical, even dangerous, behavior. Rare animals, and other attributes, provide a standard for assessing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas.

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. Life in the ancient city of Teotihuacan did not end with the collapse of Classic period society, but rather, until the constitution of the current zone of archaeological monuments, the area was a place of residence, rituals, and somewhat later, pastures and crops. We must remember that the period from AD 600 until 1521 occupies a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Campana. Pam Crabtree. Susan Johnston. Zenobie Garrett.

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dún Ailinne is an Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE-400 CE) site in Country Kildare, Ireland. It is considered as one of the Irish "royal" sites. These sites are mentioned in the early medieval literature and are large sites surrounded by an inverted bank and ditch and containing monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Collard. 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. When considering the claim that it has long been common for people to attribute spiritual power to certain body parts and bodily substances of humans and nonhuman animals and incorporate them into their religious beliefs and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jillian Mollenhauer.

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. Studies of feathered serpent imagery during Mesoamerica's Formative Period range widely in their conclusions, with little agreement about the parameters of inquiry, associated iconographic conventions, or even what constitutes a "feathered" serpent. Images of serpentine creatures have been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dilpreet Basanti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents micro-CT histological data on bone samples from Aksum’s Stelae Park cemetery (AD 50–400). Aksum was the capital of an ancient polity (AD 50–800) that spread across the northern Horn of Africa and was a major global power in the Indian Ocean trade. The most notable lasting remains of the ancient capital are its towering funerary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Judy Berryman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists in the North American Southwest and other regions recognize that ritual closure of structures reveals information about relations with ancestors, fear of dangerous forces, and other interactions between spiritual and material realms. We want to understand how such ceremonies might differ through time or place. Perhaps they form regional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chun Yu.

This is an abstract from the "Populations of Early Medieval China: Developing Anthropological Approaches to Historical Archaeology in China" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of the last two decades there have been a number of hoards of Buddhist statues excavated in Northern China. Each of these hoards contains several hundred statues of varying forms and quality. This study examines both the form and the tool marks on the statues to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Neurath.

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. In Mesoamerican religious practice, ritual killings (allosacrifice) and so-called practices of self-sacrifice (autosacrifice) often coexist simultaneously. Therefore, the ethnographic, iconographic, and historical analysis should therefore focus on what may be called the condensation of ritual relations....