Ideology (Other Keyword)
51-75 (77 Records)
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. In Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan’s religious thought, sacrifice was a creative act closely related to cosmic genesis and world sense. This behavior is evident not only in the archaeological record but also in the iconography. Two of the most common artifacts associated with this ancient practice in both...
Priests' Houses and Architectures of Ideology in East Polynesia (2015)
Most studies of East Polynesia religion focus on the largest monumental sites, those related to the "marae complex". Yet ethnohistoric documents indicate that a wide range of site types had ritual importance, including specialized structures within monumental ritual centers that had diverse functions. Priest houses form one element of the architecture of ideology. Can we identify the houses of full time ritual specialists in the archaeological record of East Polynesian in order to enrich our...
The "Private(s)" Is(Are) Political: Girding One’s Loins for Work, for Battle, for Provocation, and Ungirding for Insurgence (2018)
Many societies archaeologists seek to understand are societies of primary orality. They are "lifeworlds" of primary subsistence. Their study demands a multiplicity of approaches. Certainly one needs a sensitive yet hardy material gaze (and touch). Further, one should seek sensuous engagement in subsistence and celebration. Additionally, one should cultivate an incitement to imagine how the poetic and philosophical, of both reflective thought and of speech, are anchored in the material...
Radical Cosmological Ritual Intervention at Poverty Point (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built over...
Reconsidering the Role of Archaeology in Shaping “Affective Places”: Case Scenarios from Hawai'i and Yucatán (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western-trained scholars like to take for granted that the discipline of archaeology plays a foundational role in providing data from ancient sites from which scientists reconstruct histories, social organization, and what drew people to such places. Government institutions use such information to assign values to...
Religious Belief and Cooperation: A View from Ancient Greece (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of the Cognitive Science of Religion has proposed that the in-group cooperation needed for the development of the large, complex human societies that first appeared during the Holocene was fostered by belief in the existence of supernatural beings that monitor humans and punish misbehavior. Two competing...
Rethinking Our Concepts to Rethink Our Data: Interpreting the Material Culture of Northwest Mexico in Light of Indigenous Theory (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...
Reuse, Rubble, and Relations to Place at Ancient Maya Cities (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper traces histories of reused stone and space at ancient Maya cities. Space/Place theorists have documented the ways that physical spaces have layers of meaning tied to their history of use. In the Maya area, archaeologists have documented myriad ways in which Maya individuals have engaged with and...
Ritual Deposits at El Marquesillo, Veracruz: Examples of Long-Term Collective Social Memory (2016)
The settlement of El Marquesillo in Southern Veracruz was inhabited during the Mesoamerican Early Formative period, emerged as an Olmec center during the Middle Formative period, and remained occupied throughout the remainder of the pre-Columbian period. During the late Middle to early Late Formative period an Olmec monumental tabletop throne was ritually terminated and deposited. This interment was accompanied by two substantial offerings suggestive of a feasting event. More than a millennium...
The Role of Venus in the Cosmologies of Mesoamerica, the American Southwest, and the Southeast (2010)
This paper describes differing but related views of the meanings of Venus in Central Mexico, West Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, and the Eastern Woodlands.
Ruins in the Daily Life of San Antonio La Baeza from the Prehispanic Past to the Modern Day (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What role do ruins play in the lives of descendant peoples? Surrounding the small mountain pueblo of San Antonio La Baeza are numerous ruins dating to different time periods. For example, below the modern pueblo are large, deep rockshelters that have been occupied from the Late Formative up until today and are covered in...
Sacred Spaces and Ideology in the Pambamarca Fortress Complex (2016)
In the northern Andes of Ecuador just north of Quito lies the Pambamarca Fortress Complex. This region was one of the last to fall to the Inca in the late 1490's/1500's as they expanded their empire, and they met great resistance from the indigenous societies of Northern Ecuador. Fighting occurred for over a decade and power strategies changed to conquer this region. These struggles are apparent, best seen through the high number of Inca fortifications and enclosures throughout the landscape....
Serpent: a Prehistoric Life-Metaphor in South Central Kansas (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.
Shellscapes and Kinscapes: A Social Network Analysis of the Southern Northwest Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social network analyses in archaeology have been successfully used to examine the connections between diverse social actors in the past. These studies have largely focused on the relationships between humans and other humans, typically using cultural materials as proxies for people....
Social Landscapes and Kapu in the Hawaiian Islands: A case study from the Ka'û district, Hawai'i Island. (2016)
In ancient Hawai'i, elites employed ideology as a way of acquiring and stabilizing political and economic power. Material evidence of this is found in the numerous temples throughout the islands and in the formalized rules for constructing households. Ethnohistoric literature describes Hawaiian households as a collection of buildings with specific functional purposes. By segregating these activity areas, the Hawaiians were seen to observe kapu, a Polynesian ideological concept which, in Hawai'i,...
Specters and Spectators: Paranornal Tourism and Historic Sites of Confinement in the American South (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, authors Cayla Colclasure (she/her) and Zoe Schwandt (they/she) consider the phenomenon of paranormal tourism and related media as one way various publics engage with historic sites of confinement in the American South and attempt to bridge the epistemological divide between these forms of engagement with the past and the discipline of...
The Storm God, Feathered Serpents, and Possible Rulers at Teotihuacan (2007)
In this paper, George Cowgill focuses on how Mesoamericans used worldviews and ideologies in sociopolitical ways. More specifically, Cowgill argues that specific sociopolitical ideologies arise when there is a shared worldview.
Theory, Strategies, Objectives, and Preliminary Results of Transdisciplinary Studies of Ancient Consciousness on Time and Space out of Eurasia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient consciousness may be a key concept to discern human biocultural evolutionary processes. We reassess how indigenous people out of Eurasia developed consciousness about time and space and created conceptual dividing apparatuses, like calendar systems. We begin with theoretical...
Tracing Theoretical Approaches to Constructing and Contesting Whiteness in Southeastern Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whiteness has been an especially salient phenomenon in shaping the histories, identities, and landscapes of the US Southeast, even as social and political rhetoric have long worked to render Whiteness invisible and implicit. However, explicit archaeological examinations of Whiteness have been comparatively limited within the...
The Transition between Epiclassic to Early Postclassic in Western Mexico. Processes involved in the Sayula Basin (Jalisco). (2015)
The transition between Epiclassic and Postclassic period in Western Mexico it has been linked to the Aztatlan Tradition. The Sayula basin offer a great opportunity to explore the processes involved, the cultural assimilation and interaction between two contemporary major cultural components: one system with strongly local identity related to a major social structure part of the Epiclassics sites like Ixtepete, La Higuerita, Los Altos de Jalisco and furthermore like La Quemada (Zac). The other...
Twenty Years of Studying the Salado (2015)
Archaeology Southwest (formerly the Center for Desert Archaeology) has been heavily engaged in studying the Salado Phenomenon through the lens of migration for nearly twenty years. Our research has been both intensive and extensive in scope: gathering new data from sites on public and private lands, reanalyzing existing collections, and scrutinizing published and unpublished reports from nearly every valley and basin in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Here we summarize this...
Urban Ideologies and Demographic Revolutions in Ancient Mesopotamia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...
Weaving Ancestors into Everyday Objects: Basketmaker II Use of Human Hair (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-pottery farmers on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers fabricated various artifacts using human hair cordage. The textiles made of this material ranged from intimate personal adornments to utilitarian rabbit nets and load-bearing tumplines. Aside from important functional properties of elasticity and...
What you see is what you believe: Mortuary Ideology and transmutations in Funerary Practice at the advent of the Xiongnu Empire in Mongolia. (2015)
This paper examines the intersection of mortuary ritual and beliefs, at the edge between funerary ideology and religion. The formation of the Xiongnu polity in the 3rd century BCE in what today is Mongolia included the introduction of new funerary regimes that conspicuously upended previous mortuary traditions. Xiongnu mortuary practice breaks a millennium-long convention of east-west orientation of funerary monuments and accompanying inhumations, the creation of visibly prominent and highly...
When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality, and the Numic Ritual Life Cycle (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the critical subject of indigenous oral traditions in California and the Great Basin. Using an interdisciplinary approach that considers Numic oral teachings relative to place-based data in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and geology, the author interrogates traditional narratives encoding...