The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ritual practice is a multisensory experience that calls on higher powers, spirits, or ancestors to intercede favorably in the lives of the practitioner. Ritual reverberates through all facets of life in Mesoamerica, a region with a rich record of ethnographic, historic, and archaeological data detailing the diversity of rituals embodied in daily religious practice. Yet like so many other facets of research in Mesoamerica, men receive the attention of investigators who resultantly place women in subsidiary roles or omit them from narratives all together. This session compiles evidentiary support that validates the vital role women played in ancestral and contemporary Mesoamerican rituals. Presenters discuss the religious practices women performed at home and in extravagant tombs, family shrines, sweat baths, and present-day cofradia houses. The women figured as the protagonists of these papers span from royal women to agrarian mothers and employ varied ritual toolkits encompassing brooms, figurines, spindle whorls, metates, textiles, sculpture, water, and flowers. Without a greater understanding of women-led or women-focused rituals, researchers will continue to distort essential aspects of Mesoamerican religious life.