Ritual (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Orozco.

This paper critically reassesses the use of subterranean features among prehistoric Native Americans of North America. A survey of the archaeological and ethnographic literature suggests that pre-historic Native Americans used subterranean features in a ritual context, although the ritual component is rarely acknowledged directly. The significance of the features becomes apparent when the context, mainly construction and artifact deposition, is considered. Many of these subterranean features...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Munson. Jonathan Scholnick. Matthew Looper. Yuriy Polyukhovych. Martha Macri.

To study the Classic Maya is to at once recognize the shared material representations and practices that give coherence to this cultural category as a unit of analysis, as well as to critically examine the diversity and idiosyncrasy of specific cultural traits. Maya hieroglyphic writing, in particular the tradition of inscribing texts and images on carved stone monuments, offers evidence for widespread and mutually intelligible cultural practices that were neither unchanging nor uniform in their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey.

Over the past three years, investigations of over fifty ritual cave sites across the country of Belize by the Las Cuevas Archaeological Reconnaissance Project and the Belize Cave Research Project have yielded surprising findings: at least nine of the caves have modifications or construction directly outside of the entrances. These modifications took place for the first and only time during the Late Classic, a centuries-long period characterized by droughts, overpopulation, the failure of Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caven P. Clark.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Villeneuve. Brian Hayden.

The emergence of socio-economically complex hunter/gatherer communities has been identified as one of the most critical theoretical issues in the study of early cultural evolution. In North America, one key geographical area for studying the emergence of complex hunter/gatherer societies has been the Northwest Coast and Plateau. The village site of Keatley Creek, one of the largest sites of complex hunter/gatherers in Western Canada, has featured prominently in understanding the emergence and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatsuya Murakami. Diego Matadamas Gomora. Shigeru Kabata. Julieta Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlalancaleca was one of the largest settlements before the rise of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico. Our ongoing research indicates large-scale urban transformations in the transition from the Middle to Late Formative period. Tlalancaleca during the later Formative is characterized by a multi-centric spatial organization consisting of multiple monumental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Joyce. Sarah Barber. Jeffrey Brzezinski.

This paper considers the relationship between sacrifice and the people, practices, and objects assembled on later Formative period public buildings in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca. Excavations in public buildings at numerous sites in the region have found evidence for ceremonial practices including the emplacement of earth offerings, the interment of human bodies in cemeteries, and ritual feasting. The objects emplaced in public buildings as offerings included ceramic vessels, greenstone,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brzezinski. Arthur Joyce. Sarah Barber.

Examining the construction and use of public spaces in precolumbian Mesoamerica has been productive in revealing the ways in which people constituted local communities. As settings for activities such as feasting, cemetery burial, and caching ceremonies, public buildings brought together living people, ancestors, divinities and religious objects through practices that reproduced local histories and identities. Recent research on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico has focused on the public,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Benz. Kurt W. Alt. Vecihi Özkaya.

Until the end of the 1990s, southeastern Turkey was considered a secondary center of Neolithisation. However, excavations in the context of the Ilisu Dam project have shown that there was a long local tradition of permanent settlement since at least the Epipaleolithic. Evidences from Körtik Tepe indicate strong commitments to the site and to households. Social and emotional relationships were consolidated by intense ritual behavior, including burials beneath house floors, the increasing use of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl J. Maurer.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. J. Judge.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Watson. Patricia Gilman. Douglas Kennett. Peter Whiteley. Stephen Plog.

Birds are key actors in Pueblo narratives of emergence and symbolize the six sacred directions in Pueblo cosmology and in some instances religious sodalities and societal divisions; bird feathers are powerful offerings to the supernatural, carrying prayers to the gods who in turn use them for adornment. Simply put, birds are central to modern Pueblo cosmology and social and religious life. Similarly, iconographic representations and the ritual treatment of avian species such as the Scarlet Macaw...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guillaume Molle.

The Tuamotu Archipelago consists of one of the largest concentrations of atolls in the world. However, the archaeological history of these islands remains much less documented in comparison with the other high islands of French Polynesia. The harsh environmental conditions of the atolls have not favored the preservation of archaeological structures, with the exception of the coral-built marae. Since the pioneering works of K.P. Emory in the 1930s, around six hundred of these ceremonial sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James A. Brown.

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.

DOCUMENT Full-Text David Eckles.

Excavations at the Garrett Allen (Elk Mountain) archaeological site recovered a large and diverse faunal assemblage. The purpose of this article is to summarize data on the faunal remains with emphasis on the unusual aspects of the assemblage. A brief introduction to the site excavations and chronology is presented first. More detailed information about previous investigations at the site is discussed in Eckles (2013).

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Potter.

In the Southwest, feasting is understood as one of the primary mechanisms whereby small-scale agriculturalists of the past increased the social, demographic, and political scale of their societies. This study examines both artifact assemblages and communal architecture from a number of prehistoric sites in the Mesa Verde area. Consistent increases in the number and elaborateness of decorated serving bowls and the size of communal spaces suggest an increase in the frequency, intensity, and scale...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clarissa Cagnato. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Griselda Pérez. Damaris Menéndez.

The discovery of a fire shrine atop the adosada of Structure M13-1 at El Perú-Waka’ supports the archaeological and epigraphic records which have at various places in the Maya region (including Waka’) made reference to the arrival in AD 378 of Siyaj K’ak’. This event resulted in the introduction of the fire shrine cult, glossed as Wite Naah in Mayan, from Teotihuacan to the Maya Lowlands. M13-1’s cal AD 7th century fire shrine is the final phase of the main temple’s fronting platform. Careful...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clarissa Cagnato. Olivia Navarro-Farr. Griselda Pérez Robles. Juan Carlos Pérez Calderón. Damaris Menéndez.

Structure M13-1, a major civic-ceremonial building at the center of the Classic Maya city El Perú-Waka’ in northwestern Petén, Guatemala, held special significance to its citizenry. While it was likely ritually significant since the Early Classic period, evidence indicates it was the focus of sustained and repeated ceremonial acts of likely varying scales, accouterment, and practitioners throughout the Late and Terminal Classic periods (circa A.D. 600-900). In this paper, we explore data from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Weiland. Laura Crawford. Bret J. Ruby.

At Hopewell Mound Group in Ross County Ohio (33RO27), 2013 magnetic gradiometer investigations redefined the long invisible Great Circle, a 120-meter diameter woodhenge. The 2016 excavation of one of four central features within the Great Circle revealed a large thermal feature. Although unusually large for this purpose, the arrangement of fire-cracked rock, clay lining, hot-burning hardwoods and grass seed suggest a classic earth oven common to domestic sites. However, ethnographic analogy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marley Brown III.

The topic of ritual practices among the enslaved population of the early Chespeake has been extensively examined,, most procatively by scholars such as Patricia Samford ,who have attempted to link what is known about the importation of captive Africans from historical sources to physical evidence encountered at the living sites of the enslaved in particular places during specific periods.  This paper develops a model, combining recent efforts to incorporate memory work, notably forgetting, into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Janusek.

Archaeologists tend to apply the term ‘formative’ to phases of emergent complexity in a given world region. I critically engage the concept by honing in on what I term incipient urbanism as a core dimension of formative complexity. I draw on comparative data from across the Americas to situate formative complexity and incipient urbanism in the Andean Lake Titicaca basin. Archaeologists working in the region have known for years that by at least 800 BC, the region was home to multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pollack. Gwynn Henderson.

In many parts of the world, the construction and maintenance of a domestic dwelling is often accompanied by rituals intended to bless the house, appease the ancestors, or please the spirit world. Within the Fort Ancient (A.D. 1000-1750) area of the middle Ohio River Valley, as evidenced at Fox Farm, a large Fort Ancient village in north-central Kentucky, such rituals may take the form of objects (pipes, shell or bone pendants, marginella shell beads, drilled deer toe bones [cup and pin game],...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Toni Gonzalez. Helen R. Haines.

During three field seasons, chultuns were investigated at three small groups representing the settlement zone, public space, and core near the main plaza of Ka’Kabish. Puleston asserted that chultuns must have a utilitarian function because they are overwhelmingly found in rural, domestic contexts. This very processualist logic denies the possibility of domestic ritual that is so prevalent in Maya ethnography. Furthermore, at Ka’Kabish, Uaxactun, Nakum and other sites, chultuns are regularly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jane Baxter.

When Bahamian scholar and educator Arlene Nash Ferguson wrote about the history of the famous Bahamian festival of Junkanoo, she began her story with enslaved people taking action under cover of darkness. Freed from labor for the two day Christmas holiday, the enslaved went into “the bush” at night time, adorned their bodies with decorations found in the natural world, and reenacted, recreated, and created dances, songs, and traditions reflecting their African heritage. Nighttime afforded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses. Ugo Fusco.

Veii (Veio) was one of the most significant urban centers in central Italy during the Etruscan Period. The Campetti-Southwest excavations at Veii have uncovered more evidence from this site pertaining to its Iron Age settlement (Period I), the Etruscan period urban sanctuary (Period II), and later occupations. The focus of this research is Period I (late 9th to mid-7th cent. B.C.E.) and II (mid-7th to 4th cent. B.C.E.). The faunal remains from these time periods add to our understanding of the...