Ritual (Other Keyword)
151-175 (263 Records)
Ethnographically cave use in Mesoamerica is well-documented and there are many accounts of modern rituals occurring in or near caves. These analogies provide excellent evidence for understanding the meaning of caves and provide supporting evidence to demonstrate that they functioned as ritual spaces in ancient society, yet analogies have little resonance when considering ancient rites occurring deep within caves. For this type of question we are much more dependent on the archaeological record...
Local Ritual and Social Change in the Andean Formative Period at Hualcayán, Peru (2016)
Research in the Andes has long focused on how early complex societies performed elaborate rituals in monumental spaces to both organize communities and establish authority. In pursuing this research for the Formative Period (1800-1 BC), comparisons between local ritual practices and the regional traditions of Kotosh and Chavín have overshadowed the study of how and why communities selectively altered and replaced ritual practices over the long term. For example, how did different generations...
Macro- and Microbotanical Results from Select Archaeological Contexts in the Plaza of the Columns Complex, Teotihuacan, Mexico (2018)
Paleoethnobotanical analyses provide significant information regarding past human behaviors, which include the selection, production, and consumption of plant resources, among others. This paper focuses on select archaeological contexts, domestic and ritual in nature, which have been investigated from a paleoethnobotanical perspective at the urban center of Teotihuacan, and more specifically in the area known as the Plaza of the Columns Complex. The recovery of macrobotanicals such as maize (Zea...
Mapping Lines and Lives at the Sajama Lines, Bolivia: A Model for Ritualized Landscapes (2017)
Ritual trails and geoglyphs in the Andes date back as far as 400 BC and are perhaps best represented in the Nasca lines and the ceques of Cusco. In western Bolivia, the Sajama lines are a network of ritual trails that cover an estimated 22,000 square kilometers and connect pucaras, chullpas, villages, and chapels. Although this ritualized landscape was heavily modified during the Colonial (1532-1820) and Republican (1821-1952) eras, these pathways had prehistoric use by the local Carangas. These...
Material manifestation of ritual survival after abandonment (2015)
The presence of burials placed on the floor of the palaces and private patios within elite complexes but without offerings are truthful testimonies about the time of the Mayan settlements abandonment at the end of the Classical Terminal period. Such burials have been found at the Acropolis of La Blanca (Petén, Guatemala). Years later, during the Early Postclassic period, when those buildings had already partially collapsed and debris covered Terminal Classic material vestiges, other individuals...
Material Perspectives on Canal Ceremonialism at Chavín de Huántar (2015)
This work presents an interpretive revaluation of canal ceremonialism at the Andean Formative civic-ceremonial center of Chavín de Huántar. Focusing on a set of spaces within the subterranean stone-lined waterway "Canal 2," excavated in 2012 in an "Esplanade" area flanking the site’s monumental core, this study explores the excavation hypothesis that canals acted as stages for the ritual-sacrificial deposition of artifacts. Through an analysis of stratigraphic and material patterning within...
Maya Worldviews at Conquest (2009)
Maya Worldviews at Conquest examines Maya culture and social life just prior to contact and the effect the subsequent Spanish conquest, as well as contact with other Mesoamerican cultures, had on the Maya worldview. Focusing on the Postclassic and Colonial periods, Maya Worldviews at Conquest provides a regional investigation of archaeological and epigraphic evidence of Maya ideology, landscape, historical consciousness, ritual practices, and religious symbolism before and during the Spanish...
Means, Motive, and Opportunity: Use of the Sun Pyramid Cave at Teotihuacan Post Termination (2018)
Ceramics and radiocarbon dates indicate that Teotihuacanos ceased using the cave beneath the Sun Pyramid around the middle of the third century CE, at a time when the city was only just entering its "Classic" period florescence. A reverential termination seems quite likely. Evidence also indicates that post termination use of the cave occurred. As there were approximately 1700 years in between cessation of initial use and modern discovery of the cave in 1974, this paper explores the question of...
Memento Mori: Scalar reference, architectonic persistence and the continuity of ritual memory at Huaca Colorada, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2017)
This paper examines the temporal dimensions underwriting relationships linking humans, architectural representations and the meaningful places they reference in past Andean life-worlds. I argue that for the Moche of the North Coast of Peru, acts of symbolic compression and miniaturization served to reanimate specific times, known ceremonial locales, and the social identities created and reaffirmed in these places. The ritual efficacy of architectural simulacra rests in their mimetic power to...
Migration and Cultural Change: Effects of Migration on Ritual Practices in Early Medieval Britain and Colonial America (2017)
A migration can have several different effects upon a native population as the groups interact: the decimation of one population either to famine, disease or war, the cultural integration of the two groups either forcefully or peacefully, or the continued separation of the two cultures through distance or social stratification. These effects are perhaps best understood archaeologically through an examination of the European and Native American interactions beginning in the 16th century and those...
Miniature in Everything but Meaning: A Contextual Analysis of Miniature Vessels at Homol’ovi (2016)
Within the archaeological literature there are several studies of miniature vessels that have attempted to explain the presence of these unique artifacts in prehistoric Puebloan society. The two most common hypotheses are that these pots were made by inexperienced potters while learning their craft, or they were produced by expert ceramic artisans and served a ritual function. These analyses have largely depended on assessing the skill with which miniature vessels were produced. The results of...
Miniature Pottery Vessels in the Mimbres Region (2016)
This paper presents a study of Miniature Pottery vessels from the Mimbres region of the American Southwest. I define these vessels as no larger than 10cm in length in any dimension. My data set includes over 150 vessels from sites in southwestern New Mexico. I will look at attributes such as painting, slip, temper, and completeness as well as depositional context to make inferences about the possible uses of these vessels in the time period that is covered. My vessels span almost 1000 years...
Missing Bodies and Cat Skeletons: New Perspectives on Ritual in Viking Age Iceland (2015)
The research that has dominated Icelandic burial practices has until very recently been quite narrow. Burials were excavated to extract the skeleton and artifacts within the grave cut itself, leading to a central theory that Icelandic burials are poor in ritual and culture. Recent excavation and theories, however, have led to open area excavations of pagan cemeteries, which reveal much more complicated ritual. Snorri Sturlusson, the author of the famous Icelandic Sagas and Eddas, might give us...
Monumental Stonework and the Making of Places and History on the Northwest Coast of British Columbia (2016)
Archaeologists do not think of the peoples of the Northwest Coast as monumental stone builders, yet current research indicates that the enhancement and demarcation of critical resource sites entailed both the massive movement of stone and the building of stone monuments. The Coast Salish peoples built remarkable numbers of burial cairns and mounds, using stones cleared from important and valuable root crop fields to then inscribe the landscape with their ancestral dead. Their Heiltsuk neighbors...
Moving Places: The Creation of Quilcapama (2016)
During the Middle Horizon (AD 650-1050), the site of Quilcapampa la Antiqua in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru grew from a small village into a major political center. This chapter considers how the growth of Quilcapampa was linked in part to the experiences of people passing through this location. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s idea of “technologies of enchantment”, we examine how the site’s associated geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pathways marked and gave meaning to a place already ritually charged...
Mule Canyon Ruins (1975)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Nan Madol Archaeological District, Pohnpei Island, Federated States of Micronesia (1985)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Native Science: How a Native American Understanding of Ritual as a Science can help Archaeological Analysis. (2017)
In the last couple of decades, Native peoples across the world have become more vocal that indigenous rituals are not the result of religious superstition or mechanisms of social control, but the formulae of indigenous sciences. Ceremonies and many myths, they argue, have been mistakenly categorized as religious by anthropologists due to their baroque appearance and our modern separation between nature from culture. Gregory Cajete and Leroy Little Bear have led the movement to re-categorize...
Nectandra sp. seed from archaeological contexts in Panquilma. An approach based on morphological features and contextual information (2016)
One of the main socioeconomic characteristics during the late periods is the high and dynamic presence of exchange of foreign goods, many of them coming from the amazon basin, including Nectandra sp., a seed with psychoactive properties, characteristic of moist woodlands, associated with offerings and funerary contexts in the Andean region. This study presents the preliminary analysis of Nectandra sp., including physical and chemical properties, such as the pharmacological features mentioned in...
Networks of Power: Political Relations in the Late Postclassic Naco Valley, Honduras (2011)
Little is known about how Late Postclassic populations in southeast Mesoamerica organized their political relations. Networks of Power fills gaps in the knowledge of this little-studied area, reconstructing the course of political history in the Naco Valley from the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. Describing the material and behavioral patterns pertaining to the Late Postclassic period using components of three settlements in the Naco Valley of northwestern Honduras, the book...
New perspectives on the identities and ideologies of localized ancient Andean communities through the examination of figurines. (2016)
This paper explores the quotidian use of figurines by the inhabitants of the village of Ak’awillay in the Cusco region. Most scholars have defined figurines as political tools used to support state ideologies. This research expands on this effort and focuses on the use of figurines in domestic contexts among non-state societies. The study of figurines from Ak’awillay and comparative data from archaeological and ethnographic contexts suggest that figurines had multiple uses and included ancestor...
No Hearth, No Problem: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Ceremonial Architecture at Two Late Preceramic Sites in the Norte Chico Region (2019)
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. Multi-elemental analytical techniques like X-Ray Fluorescence have been employed to determine the use of space through residues left behind from human activities. In addition, methodologies primarily used in other disciplines such as pollen analysis or micromorphology can illuminate the...
Of Cenotes and Serpents: Modern and Ancient Cave Ritual at Mayapán, Yucatán, Mexico (2015)
The pairing of ritual architecture with sacred underground spaces is common throughout Mesoamerica and makes clear the importance that ancient inhabitants of the culture area placed on caves and cenotes. These spaces were home to powerful forces. The Late Postclassic Maya center of Mayapán (1150-1450AD) is known for its clear spatial associations between temples and cenotes. These temple/cenote complexes have been found both within and outside of the large defensive city wall. Cenote Sac Uayum,...
Of kings and artisans: Comparing household and palace-temple rituals at Yanshi Shangcheng (2015)
Elite ritual has been a primary focus in Chinese archaeology. Well known studies of the oracle bones from Anyang and bronze ritual vessels have shed light on elite ritual practices but have also generated a bias linking ritual with elites. Indeed there is strong evidence of elite ritual activity in palace temples of the early Bronze Age site of Yanshi Shangcheng (the Shang city at Yanshi), located in the Central Plain area of northern China. However, there is also evidence of similar rituals in...
Offerings in the Mogollon Underworld: Big-Eyed Beings and Birds (2018)
Three Classic Mimbres vessels depict similar ceremonial processions in which individuals carry effigies of animals and/or goggle-eyed beings. The goggle-eyed effigies are versions of a figure common in both Mimbres and Jornada Mogollon rock art that may represent the Mesoamerican rain deity Tlaloc. Similar effigies have been recovered from five cave shrines in southern New Mexico and Arizona: two wooden goggle-eyed figures and one of stone, and two wooden birds. However, modern Pueblo informants...