Rethinking Archaeologies of Pilgrimage

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

Maya ethnohistory suggests that burning incense, erecting monuments, penis bloodletting, and pilgrimage were all activities associated with New Year ceremonies. These annual rites were calendrically-linked and aimed at ensuring agricultural renewal and earthly regeneration. Today, Maya New Year ceremonies involve initiation of young men prior to marriage and sexual relations, requiring self-sacrifice and long-distance pilgrimage with male elders. Cross-examining these data along side...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel W. Palka.

This study explores the possibility that some Mesopotamian clay tokens were pilgrim’s tokens, which signified interaction with spiritual powers or transactions with a shrine’s religious specialists or administrators. Pilgrim’s tokens around the world have often been made of earth and clay, some as effigies of goods desired or symbols of shrines and their spiritual forces, that are carried in bags, miniature ceramic vessels, or bullae. Previous investigations indicate that earthen artifacts have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Ristvet.

Pilgrimage is a popular phenomenon, one which involves people traveling to and gathering at specific places during specific times, usually as part of a shared religious tradition. In the Ancient Near East, religious travel existed alongside other forms of mobility with important political and social consequences, like peripatetic kingship—in which there is no one fixed court—a characteristic of the Urartian (ca. 800-600 BC), Achaemenid (ca. 550-330 BC), and Seleucid (ca. 300-100 BC) empires, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

This paper explores how a relational approach centered on the concept of taskscape could reinvigorate analyses of how pilgrimages create, sustain, or transform human-environment relations. Medieval and modern traditions of pilgrimage in Ireland are renowned for their engagement with ‘natural’ places and objects, such as mountains, springs, and stones. Some take this focus as evidence of an animistic pre-Christian heritage, but few have questioned how such practices structured peoples’ ideas and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

Chaco Canyon is generally understood to have derived its regional influence by virtue of ceremonial power. But what exactly - experientially, sensorially, affectively – was so compelling about the experience of Chacoan ritual, and how might we approach these immaterial dimensions of the archaeological record? In this paper, I suggest that ceremonial gambling/gaming was an important practice during Chacoan gatherings that allowed participants to interact directly with supernatural forces. After...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Skousen.

In this paper I discuss three tenets of what I call a relational view of pilgrimage. Overall, this perspective sees pilgrimage as a means through which people, things, places, and more move and converge in ways that instigate what Eliade (1959) called "hierophanies." The first tenet is that movement is crucial – indeed, the nature of a pilgrimage depends on what, where, and how entities (human and non-human) move and assemble. The second is that objects and landscapes (e.g., relics, offerings,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, a new political and religious capital expanded its influence in the North American Southwest. This settlement, called Paquimé or Casas Grandes, was the focus of pilgrimages that reflected and reinforced the social dominance of the elites living at the community. However, caches of millions of ocean shell, instances of human sacrifice, and other aspects of the archaeological record indicate that Paquimé itself was likely considered a living entity that helped...