Ritual and Symbolism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jan Simek. Alan Cressler.

Walter Klippel has always focused his research on animal remains from archaeological sites, especially from Southeast North America. In honor of his retirement, we review how animals are depicted in Precontact rock art sites from the region he knew so well. A wide variety of creatures—mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and even insects—were illustrated by ancient southeastern artists. Animal imagery appears in both open air and cave art, although the kinds of animals vary between these two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jill Neitzel. David Witt.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The inextricable combination of color and raw material was the most fundamental characteristic of Ancestral Pueblo jewelry. For white and shell, blue-green and turquoise, and black and various types of stone, the color and the material each had diverse sets of sacred meanings that gave ornaments their value. Together,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Sears.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An accidental discovery by bulldozer of an ancient Maya ceramic workshop has created a post-civil war chapter of exploration in central Alta Verapaz. The site of Aragón lies at the base of a mountain, near the headwaters of what becomes the Usumacinta drainage. Its Late Classic-Terminal figural contents represent a range of ritual and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Matsumoto.

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. Archaeological, ethnohistorical, art historical, and ethnographic evidence attests to extensive use of reed mats over millennia across the Maya region. In addition to being used for sleeping or sitting atop benches or floors, mats partitioned...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological projects, such as those of the Palatine-Pendici nord-est excavation, are bringing new materials and new clarity to the processes of social change that lead to urbanism in Rome, Italy. The Curiae Veteres sanctuary, located in the heart of Rome on the northern slopes of the Palatine Hill, gives exceptional insight into the earliest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre.

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. The complex Mesoamerican cosmovisión includes myths about the cultures to try to understand, their history, natural events, and their universe, through narrations and fantastic facts, which gave them an explanation about everything that they did not understand. As a consequence of this, the invention of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sophia Perdikaris. Sandrine Grouard.

This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Across the Caribbean, there are numerous dog burials from the Saladoid period and they warrant a closer look as to their purpose and function. Dog remains have been found both as burials associated with human graves but also in refuse middens along with other archaeofauna from prehistoric meals. This paper will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maxwell Forton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lacey Point is a distinctive landmark rising above the Painted Desert in Petrified Forest National Park. This prominent butte harbors a concentration of Ancestral Pueblo petroglyphs encompassing themes of fertility and hunting. Associated with these petroglyphs is a large and diverse artifact assemblage, including thousands of ceramic sherds. This is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Montoya Mar. Maby Medrano Enríquez.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Festivals and religious beliefs in contemporary Mexico are the product of a cultural synthesis between the Mesoamerican religion and Christianity. In this presentation we expose the survival of a battle scene between Spaniards and indigenous tribes represented in a patronal feast known as Los Tastoanes, in which one of the main...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Prentiss. Alysha Edwards.

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. Public sharing of food and gifts remains important to St’át’imc communities of interior British Columbia today despite decades of prohibition by Canadian authorities. The archaeological record offers evidence that public events involving large scale food preparation and sharing were commonly practiced at least since ca. 1300...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Rees.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early historical accounts suggest that drums played an important role in the ceremonial life of the prehistoric southeastern United States. However, because they were made in whole or in part of ephemeral materials, drums are virtually invisible in the archaeological record. Interestingly, historical records,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Gamble.

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Secret societies are groups of individuals that possess esoteric knowledge that is not available to non-members, and therefore are by definition exclusive. Many such societies are associated with administering ritual ceremonies. The Chumash Indians of southern California had a secret society known as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Schaffer. Robert Carr.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in the Archaeology of the Bahama Archipelago" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves act as the mythological archetype and physical portals that validate the cosmogony-cosmology-eschatology spectrum of many past and present human societies. Among the prehistoric Lucayan-Taíno of the Bahamas, caves played an important role in both validating perceptions of the cosmos, but also the maintenance of ancestral...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Theodore Kmiec.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ideological concept of the World Tree can be found in ancient and living cultures throughout the world. Many cultures located in Mexico and Mesoamerica have incorporated this tradition in their ancient indigenous art, ceremonies, and recorded oral histories. The ideology of a culture may evolve or transform due to internal and external factors over...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Stephens Reed. Michelle I. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ancient Puebloan occupation of the Aztec complex in northwest New Mexico spanned a tumultuous two and a half centuries that saw the arrival of Chacoan people and Chacoan ways in the Animas Valley in the late 11th century C.E., followed by the waning influence of Chaco by 1140, and a new era of Aztec-centered power in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine VanPool. Gavin Easley.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) is a defining characteristic of shamanism. ASC, however, is not unique to shamans nor is it a single neurological/physiological phenomenon. Mystics and mediums also use ASC, and mediums are even “possessed” to greater or lesser degrees. In contrast, most shamans go on soul flights during “ecstatic” trances....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This lecture will focus on the multifaceted world of shamanism. The presentation will show how shamans serve as vast repositories of traditional indigenous knowledge and native beliefs. The effectiveness of shamans as health care practitioners will be considered. The ingestion of mind altering substances by Amazonian shamans as part of their curing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirie Stromberg.

Shang (c. 1600 – 1046 BCE) elites were expert manipulators of soundscape. The intimacy of the relationship between music and authority during Bronze Age China has been well established, bronze bells having served as crucial markers of status and political prestige. Before the codification of the ritual orchestra, however, and beyond the performance of "music" per se, soundscapes were defined by factors such as climate and local ecological context, by animals, by the noise of human activity at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Biggie. John Walden. Jaime Awe. Rafael Guerra. Julie Hoggarth.

The plaza held special significance to the ancient Maya, and across ancient Mesoamerica. In a reflection of Maya cosmological beliefs, the plaza was seen as a representation of, and a portal to the primordial sea, the watery underworld from which all things originate. This connection is evident in various ways throughout the region, from special dedicatory deposits to decorative architecture and iconography. This presentation explores that cosmological salience through the recent excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luke John Murphy. Carly Ameen.

This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of past religions tend to fall into one of two camps: tightly-focused empirical examinations of a particular religious culture, or wide-ranging phenomenological studies divorced from any local context. Little scholarship engages with the middle ground of longue durée development in particular phenomena within the same geographic region or ecological niche....

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Thomas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prayerstone hypothesis, grounded in Southern Paiute oral history, holds that selected incised stone artifacts were votive offerings deliberately emplaced where spiritual power (puha) was known to reside, accompanying prayers for personal power and expressing thanks for prayers answered. Proposing significant and long-term linkages between Great Basin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diana Stein.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What evidence is there for the existence of Animal Masters and their rituals in the ancient Near East? This paper ranges from Mesolithic/Epi-Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic times (ca. 15,000-4000 B.C.) and spans the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. It surveys the iconography and material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew McCarthy.

This is an abstract from the "Pushing the Envelope, Chasing Stone Age Sailors and Early Agriculture: Papers in Honor of the Career of Alan H. Simmons" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Enigmatic incised stones dating to the Aceramic and early Ceramic Neolithic periods indicate an element of persistent shared material culture between Cyprus and the Levant in spite of cultural trajectories and material culture assemblages that were beginning to diverge...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Strait.

The presence of dogs across burial sites in the southwestern United States and worldwide has been well noted in archaeological literature. The ubiquity of canine burials attests to their historical role as complex social actors in human society, prompting actions and performances, taboos and transgressions. To access the true depth of meaning in many canine remains, then, we must examine them with the level of precision normally reserved for human burials. This paper offers a close reading of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johann Begel. Julien Hiquet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Skull offerings among the ancient populations of Mesoamerica are well documented by archaeological, ethnohistorical and iconographic sources. New finds in 2017, in the Lowland Maya Classic site of Naachtun (Guatemala) required intersite comparisons beyond the few well-known cases such as Uaxactun E-Group’s deposits. The association of a cached human skull and...