Ritual during Periods of Decline, Collapse, and Regeneration in Archaic States

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chapurukha Kusimba.

The role of ritual in the rise of complex societies is well understood in many regions of the world. In contrast, the roles ritual may have played in state collapse, regeneration, and resilience remains inadequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. This paper will evaluate the role of ritual in the emergence, resilience, and collapse of chiefly and state societies in Eastern and Southeastern Africa. Social and symbolic factors especially the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Robertshaw.

Historical research by David Schoenbrun has identified the arrival of a new ruling dynasty in the 16th century as a pivotal moment when instrumental power was decoupled from creative power in Bunyoro. Unlike previous rulers in Bunyoro, the new Bito kings were not healers and spirit-mediums. New state rituals developed both in new places and at pre-existing shrines, as is evident from historical and ethnographic sources. Archaeological investigations at known shrines and other sites, all of which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone.

Much of the recent discourse surrounding the collapse of archaic states is centered on the impacts of ecoside or climate change. Driven by natural scientists and increasingly sophisticated data generation and analysis methods, such environmentally-based approaches to collapse have tended to gloss over the myriad cultural factors also involved in such severe transformations, thus inhibiting our ability to fully grasp the complexities of the collapse process in the various case studies currently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florence Gaignerot-Driessen.

It is generally assumed that the Minoan Goddess remained venerated on Crete after the destruction of the Minoan and Mycenaean Palaces. In the Late Bronze Age, in the aftermath of the collapse of the palatial system, freestanding bench sanctuaries housing large terra-cotta female figures with uplifted arms and their ritual vessels appeared in a series of newly founded Cretan sites. Since their typical gesture recalls Minoan scenes allegedly representing the epiphany of a female divinity, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Sharratt.

Scholarship on Tiwanaku (AD 600-1000) emphasizes the ceremonial nature of its capital city and the role of ritual practice in incorporating diverse groups as the state’s influence expanded across the south central Andes. Although debate continues about its cause, recent research indicates that the Tiwanaku state’s political collapse played out over several centuries. In this paper, I draw on data spanning that period of fragmentation to take a diachronic perspective on the ways in which ritual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanne Murphy.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julye Bidmead.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Seifried.

This paper offers a glimpse into the roles played by religion during the decline of one empire and the emergence of another, from the perspective of a historical case study: the Mani Peninsula. Mani is a peripheral region in the Peloponnese, Greece, that converted to Orthodox Christianity under the Byzantine Empire, and its occupants maintained this religious identification throughout the subsequent periods of Ottoman and Venetian rule. This unbroken religious continuity, which can be traced in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ronald Faulseit. Jeremias Pink.

Dainzú, located in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, has a long history of religious-ceremonial significance. In the Classic Period (A.D. 200 – 900), the site expanded significantly from its once small core into an urban settlement covering around 4 km2. Our mapping project reveals that the new site construction was carefully planned out to represent a "cosmogram", or spatial representation of the ancient Zapotec ritual calendar. After the decline of Monte Albán, Dainzú was slowly abandoned as people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Nash. Ryan Williams.

In Moquegua the monumental provincial center of Cerro Baúl was ritually abandoned circa 1050CE. It is at this time that Wari affiliated occupation of the sacred summit ended and production of imperial Wari goods ceased in the region. This evidence does not indicate that the empire collapsed at this time, but instead suggests when Wari officials chose to withdraw from this frontier region. Why did they leave? In this paper we discuss the changing population dynamics in Moquegua at 1050CE and how...