Ritual (Other Keyword)
201-225 (263 Records)
An overview of religious practice and resistance reflected in the material record of Trents Cave, Barbados. The cave site is located at the bottom of a gully located between the enslaved laborer settlement and the planter’s residence at Trents Plantation. The findings suggest recurrent use of the site by persons of African descent (circa 1750s through the 1850s) for ritual, or specialized purposes, associated with iron and steel. The distinctive pattern of deposition of key artifacts...
Ritual and Southwest Asian Pastorlists: Implications of the Komachi Case (1984)
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.
Ritual and Symbol in Native Central America (1976)
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.
Ritual and Tombs around the Decline and Collapse of the Pylian State (2017)
The palatial society of the Greek Late Bronze Age collapsed around 1200BC. There were signs of widespread mass destruction throughout Greece and several of the palaces and settlements were abandoned. Two of the largest palaces, however, Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, showed evidence of rebuilding of houses in and around the palaces after the first major destruction fire. The century after the initial destruction of the palaces was a period of turmoil and filled with more devastating fires at...
Ritual animal use of "Qijia Cultural", evidence from Mogou Cemetery, Lintan County, Gansu province, China (2015)
Animal bones were frequently recovered from burials at the Mogou site. Researchers commonly assumed that they were related to specific ritual or sacrificial activities. With application of different zooarchaeological methods and approaches to the animal bones recovered from burials at mogou, this study attempt to understand human behaviour patterns behind this phenomenon, and how they change through times. Pig mandibles were recovered in large quantities from Mogou cemetery. With detailed...
Ritual Communication, Social Elaboration, and the Variable Trajectories of Paleolithic Material Culture. In: Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers (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.
Ritual Consumption? Exploring the Staging of Ritual Acts through the Deposition of Ground Stone Tools in Building 77 at Neolithic Çatalhöyük (2015)
The destruction of buildings by fire, either deliberately as a ritual act or accidentally, is among the most interesting elements of Neolithic Çatalhöyük, in central Anatolia, not least for the patterns of deposition of material culture at the time of destruction. Burnt Building 77, a well-preserved structure excavated by the current project, stands out in many respects, but one of its intriguing features is the large number of clustered grinding tools and other stone objects that seem to have...
Ritual Cycles and Organizational Plasticity in the Post-collapse Colla Society of Southern Peru (A.D. 1000-1450) (2016)
As Wengrow and Graeber (2015) recently pointed out, since the 1960s anthropologists have focused on organization types—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states and the like—that remain relatively stable over long periods of time. By contrast, this paper considers evidence from the post-collapse Colla polity of southern Peru to understand how negative perceptions of centralized authority that culminated in the collapse of the Tiwanaku state (c. A.D. 1000) both demanded, and provided the impetus for, the...
Ritual Fires and Sacred Hearths: the management of wood resources in Postclassic Tarascan Society of the Zacapu Basin, Michoacán (2015)
According to ethnohistoric sources, fire played a central role in the ritual practices of Postclassic Tarascan society. To venerate Curicaueri, the fire god and the most senior-ranking deity in the Tarascan pantheon, sacred hearths were kept perpetually burning outside temples, and the cazonci (king) was personally responsible for obtaining the impressive quantities of wood necessary for this feat. Fuel acquisition for these fires was often embedded in other ceremonial activities, such as hunts...
Ritual Modification in the Context of Social Unrest in the Northern San Juan (2016)
Among the Ancestral Pueblo peoples of the northern San Juan, outbreaks of warfare coincided with periods of environmental deterioration and subsistence stress. The archaeological record of this region contains abundant data that reflect a final period of heightened lethal interactions in the late A.D. 1200s. The data reveal a pattern of attacks that ended the occupations of several villages just before the northern San Juan was permanently depopulated by Pueblo peoples about A.D. 1280. Evidence...
Ritual Power and Politics in Mesopotamia (2017)
In times of political and societal instability public ritual acts as a stabilizing force. During the first millennium B.C.E with the rise and collapse of several powerful empires, ancient Babylonia witnessed much of this political turmoil and instability. Kings of each succeeding empire, appropriated long-established Mesopotamian religious ideology to cast themselves as divinely selected rulers. They manipulated the celebration of the akitu, a twelve-day religious New Year’s festival, to...
Ritual Practices and the Negotiation of Wari-Tiwanaku Relations at Cerro Baúl (2016)
The presence of both Wari and Tiwanaku colonies in the Moquegua Valley (southern Peru) offers a unique opportunity to study the colonial strategies of these empires and their interactions during the first millennium AD. Here, we more specifically explore the role of ritual practices in mediating relations between the Wari and Tiwanaku empires. We focus on a Titicaca basin inspired platform and court complex located outside of the main Wari administrative sector of the site of Cerro Baúl,...
The Ritual Reuse of Maya Cave Shrines after Abandonment (2015)
Caves are among the most sacred geographic features in Mesoamerica and have been used throughout history as the setting for multiple ritual events. In this paper, the author looks at several shrines in central Guatemala that were rediscovered long after they were abandoned by the original ritual practitioners and regained importance. The renewed activity often reflects very different functions of the rituals performed there—in caves along a major trade route cutting through the region, for...
Ritual Smoking: Evidence from Archaeological Smoking Pipes (2017)
Answering the question of what was smoked in prehistoric pipes benefits from a multi-proxy approach. Partially charred residue (dottle) provides more answers than does the black carbon that often lines the interior of archaeological pipes. Pipes examined from the American Southwest and Great Basin attest to use of a variety of plants, sometimes including ground maize, as smoking mixtures. Remains within the partially burned dottle are identified by pollen, phytolith, starch, macrofloral, and...
The Ritual Systerm of the Zhongli King's Bronzes (2015)
Since the Zhongli King's tomb in Anhui (China) was excavated in 2013, various types of bronze artifact were found which can be sourced to different regions in the Late-Chunqiu period. Through examning these bronzes, this article is going to analyze where they were coming from, how they were arranged into the tomb and what kind of ritual systerm the Zhongli King was referring to, which accordingly would be helpful to get a better understanding of the exotic funeral structure of this tomb. It can...
Ritual to the hills and water in Mejicanos, Amatitlán, Guatemala: the rock art evidence (2016)
The Mejicanos archaeological site is located on the side of a hill surrounded by other hills and a volcanic complex, in addition to beach to Lake Amatitlan. This situation apparently sufficed for implementation of major religions to water and hills as evidenced by the ceramic offerings deposited in the lake during the Classic period as well as the many petroglyphs found in the rocky site sets. These consist mainly recorded in the rocks and miniature representations of temples, usually with...
Ritual Use of Fauna in the Casas Grandes Region (2015)
The use of faunal remains for ritual purposes was an important part of Casas Grandes society throughout the Medio period (1200 – 1450 A.D.). The past inhabitants of this region utilized the bones of numerous animals for ritual and symbolic functions, as well as for personal adornment. Past archaeological and zooarchaeological research conducted within this region has focused significantly on the site of Paquimé and the artifacts/remains recovered from that site. This paper, although considering...
Ritualized Shatter: An Introduction of Obsidian to La Mipla, Belize (2015)
California State University, Los Angeles Archaeological Field Program in Central America conducted an investigation of a sinkhole containing a small grotto at the ancient Maya site of La Milpa, Belize in 2014. Excavation discovered that a rubble-cored platform had been built around the feature, formalizing the space and suggesting that it had functioned as a sacred landmark. During the excavations, a fairly dense concentration of sherds was encountered along with three dozen fragments of...
Ritualized Shatter: Obsidian in a Ritual Context at La Milpa, Belize (2016)
During the 2014 and 2015 field seasons, the California State University, Los Angeles Sacred Landscapes Archaeological Project conducted an investigation of a collapsed chultun at the ancient Maya site of La Milpa. The collapse pit had a small grotto at the northern end and excavation uncovered a plaster and rubble cored platform enclosing the feature. The platform formalized the space and suggested that it had functioned as a sacred landmark. During the excavations, a fairly dense concentration...
Rock Art as Ritual Communicator: A Theoretical Evaluation (2017)
Archaeologists typically dissect rock art stylistically, symbolically, and chronologically. Symbols, in particular, lead to studies of representational imagery, entoptic phenomena, or religious icons. What remains underexplored is the concept of animism and its related behavioral activities. This paper applies a behavioral theory of communication to study the interactions between people and things. It uses performance characteristics analysis to determine the activities associated with...
The Role of Rare Animals During the Pueblo IV Period: Evidence of Ritual at Sapa’owingeh (LA 306) (2016)
Examining the relationships between humans and animals during the Classic period contributes to our understanding of life in the Northern Rio Grande region and the larger Pueblo world. Utilizing ethno-historic and archaeological evidence for the use of mammalian and avian fauna, this poster demonstrates the significance of rare animals from midden, room, and kiva contexts from the ancestral Tewa site Sapa’owingeh (LA 306). Ritual fauna in the Southwest were often carnivores and birds. Species...
Rooting the Kiva: The Placement of Coal in Ancestral Pueblo Construction Rituals (2015)
Architectural construction is the process by which material and non-material elements and overall spatial setting are made fixed. Consideration of the ways in which physical space-defining elements function can provide insights to the ways in which space was used and understood by the occupants or builders. This study illuminates how ancestral Pueblo kiva construction rituals were integrated within Pueblo worldview concepts in the northern Southwest during the Pueblo II (A.D 1050-1150) and...
The Sacred and the sacred (2015)
The word sacred (or Sacred) can encompass many meanings. Some are tangible – others not. The sacred can exist in the mind or be defined on a map. Are there two sacreds – one with a small "s" and the other with a capital "S"? What constitutes the Sacred and who defines it, and with what parameters? How is sacredness determined, and who decides? Is it a legal term that is defined by the courts? Are there degrees of sacredness? Can sacred and profane co-exist? What role do Native oral...
Sacred Consumption: Food and Ritual in Aztec Art and Culture (2016)
This paper is about food, its depiction in Aztec art, and its ritual use in Aztec culture. Integral to a society on many levels, food is often a cultural reflection, mirroring what is significant to a particular group. The representation of food and its consumption is prevalent in the surviving artworks created in various media by the Aztecs of Central Mexico in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The symbolic use of food and consumption is also evident in Aztec ritual, another subject...
Salt-Gila Aqueduct (Fannin-McFarland Aqueduct) Archaeological Data Collection Studies and Supplemental Class III Survey Project
This project presents a series of publications associated with the Salt-Gila Aqueduct Archaeological Data Collection Studies and Supplemental Class III Survey Project (SGA). The research focused on data recovery at those sites potentially subject to impact as a consequence of Central Arizona Project construction. Salt-Gila Aqueduct Central Arizona Project construction occured along a route extending 97 km from a point south of Apache Junction, Arizona, to the Picacho Reservoir. Significant...