Ritual (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Gillette.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth (Liz) Moran.

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...

PROJECT USDI Bureau of Reclamation, Phoenix Area Office.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Crown.

Consumption of caffeinated drinks made with cacao and perhaps holly is well documented for Chaco Canyon. Less understood is the context of consumption. Evidence for cylinder vessel production, use and termination particularly reveals aspects of drinking ritual, including frothing. New compositional analysis demonstrates how Chaco potters decorated pots with post-firing pigments on stucco, permitting repeated decoration and cleansing of drinking vessels. Changes in the sizes, shapes, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bridget M. Zavala.

Many archaeologists have recorded plazas, altars, and rock art in Durango's pre-Hispanic landscapes. These spaces are often characterized as settings for ritual activities. Nevertheless, few researchers have posited the kinds of activities that were carried out in these spaces. In this paper I analyze data from excavation of the sites of Corral de Piedra and Los Berros in the Sextin valley in northern Durango, Mexico. The materials, architecture and spatial distribution suggest a variety of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Trond Meling.

The red deer is one of the most common motifs at several Late Mesolithic rock carving sites along the coast of southern Norway. It is assumed that this animal was both an important food resource as well as an object of rituals and religious beliefs during this period. The focus of this paper will be to examine how the red deer appears in different contexts at settlement sites during the Stone Age, and to explore how these contexts reflect diverse activities, including rituals and ceremonies. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

The Ojibway on the northern and southern shores of Lake Superior of North America created transitory as well as relatively permanent material expressions of sacred experiences and cultural narratives. Using examples of 'spirit objects' expressed via emplaced pictographs in the landscape in Ontario Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Mide’wiwin birch bark scrolls, and culturally modified ‘storied’ trees, this paper compares and contrasts dynamic and emplaced expressions of the sacred, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

The transition from forager-collectors to small-scale agricultural communities, in the case of southern Levant the Natufian to Pre-Pottery Neolithic periods, is widely viewed by researchers as a critical evolutionary threshold, one that both sees the development of new economic realities, and at the same time, long-term continuity in select ritual practices. Numerous studies have put forth functional and symbolic interpretations for the existence of skull removal in specific ethnographic,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Locke Clarke.

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 Katelyn Bishop. Samantha Fladd. Adam Watson.

Chaco Canyon, located in northwestern New Mexico, is widely believed to have formed the religious, economic, and political core of a large regional network that thrived during the Pueblo II period. However, debate continues to surround Chacoan ceremonial and sociopolitical organization. One approach to understanding the social-ceremonial organization of Chacoan great houses is through an understanding of the nature of ritual practice and the scales at which it was organized. Pueblo peoples, past...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nowell L. Morris.

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 Barbara A. Walling. Richard A. Thompson.

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 Kathleen Hull.

Drawing on archaeological data from the greater Los Angeles Basin, this paper examines sequences of intentional ground-stone artifact fragmentation and singular or multiple-recombined fragment placement within various feature contexts. Recent studies of putative communal mourning features have indicated an initial suite of intentional artifact fragmentation and treatment practices including pigmentation or burning, but ongoing study of these and other types of features has revealed additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Putzel.

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 Zachary Hruby.

Among the myriad types of votive offerings created by the Classic Maya, many contain chipped-stone obsidian and flint materials. These caches often consist of debitage, cores, flakes, blades, and sometimes so-called "eccentrics", which are elaborately chipped ceremonial items that sometimes take the form of god effigies. The contexts of these deposits can include the stairways, centerlines, and corners of important structures, below stelae and other monuments, and in the center of royal or elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel L Matheny. Annaliese Dempsey.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research in Maritime Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Seafarers have long been associated with ritual and superstition.  Maritime ritual in Antiquity was often rooted in religion, as sailors for instance offered libations to the gods for a safe voyage.  In the early modern period, however, seafaring cultural practices were characterized as superstitious, and the ritualized activities on board...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jacquelin E. St. Clair.

Archaeological data show acts which may at first appear to involve merely the acquisition of food are, indeed, interwoven with spiritual beliefs and emotions. Bison kill sites have been investigated to gain information regarding hunting strategies and food appropriation. However, some of the sites have yielded additional information taking us beyond the procurement of food, widening our view to include religion, rituals and ceremonialism. The Cooper site (Bement 1999) offers early evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Mistretta.

Feline eyes have a refractory nature that relates to the dichotomy of light and shadows in Andean traditions in Peru and suggests they are significant in Wari iconography. Andean ethnographies have expressed an importance of binary concepts that play a role in understanding of cosmology, mythology, and ritual. I will use Susan E. Bergh’s (1999) classification of Wari elite textile iconography and apply it to ritual ceramic iconographic data from excavations at Conchopata to identify the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Moses.

The Area Sacra di Sant’Omobono in Rome, situated on the banks of the Tiber River at the base of Capitoline Hill, contains evidence of Rome’s people from the earliest inhabitants to modern day. This research utilizes zooarchaeological analysis to investigate how the space was used in three time periods: Archaic, late Roman, and Medieval. The diachronic analysis of the faunal remains reflects the range of uses at the site during its occupation and highlights the integration of quotidian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hendrik Van Gijseghem. Giacomo Gaggio. Kevin Vaughn.

Mina Primavera was a hematite mine exploited during the first part of the Early Intermediate Period by members of Nasca society. Its exceptional preservation conditions have led to the recovery of a large assemblage of botanical remains. Recent analysis of the ubiquity and diversity of botanical species allow us to reconstruct consumption practices that took place as part of mining activities. However, observation of taphonomic processes and stratigraphic distribution of the hundreds of maize...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus. Jeffrey Clark.

Star mounds, named for their star-like shape, have been an enigmatic feature class in the Samoan Archipelago. Researchers have posited several potential functions for these monumental architectural features, including grave and territorial markers, but their primary function appears to have been as surfaces for pigeon catching. But, excavations of these features have been few and data limited. Here, we review old as well as recent data on star mounds relating to their physical attributes (size,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld.

Chavín de Huántar is a complex ritual site widely recognized for its connections to other regional centers. While much of this regional interaction is understood based on common ceramic styles and designs as well as the presence of non-local material, much less is known of the actual mode of transportation. Llama caravans most certainly played a key role in the movement of goods across space during Chavín times. Were llamas for caravans raised in the proximities of Chavin? Were caravan llamas a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Eeckhout.

During the 2014 field campaign, the Ychsma Project (Université Libre de Bruxelles) has uncovered a small building decorated with murals in the Second Precinct of the site of Pachacamac, Central Coast of Peru. The floors of the building were covered with hundreds of various offerings, including many stones. These stones have shapes, colors and overall look very different from those present in the local geology. The study of the archaeological context and origin of these stones offers a new and...

DOCUMENT Full-Text John W. Greer. Mavis Greer.

A finely made bifacial skinning knife was left on a small natural pointed hill apparently as a non-utilitarian offering placed on a high promontory, a common prehistoric practice across much of western North America. Age is unknown, but the tool is believed to date from the Late Prehistoric Period or terminal Archaic, or about A.D. 200-1200.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Brown.

For contemporary Tz’utujil Maya ritual practitioners living in the highlands of Guatemala, the night is a particularly potent time and one to which they are inherently linked. Individuals often learn of their destiny to become ritual practitioners when they are first contacted by ancestral beings, known collectively as nawales, at night during dreams. Thereafter ancestral nawales and ritual practitioners enter into mutually beneficial social relationships that are mediated through sacred objects...