Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Inuit and Yupiit living on the coasts and islands of the North Pacific inhabited a landscape populated by spirits, animal persons, and object-beings. Human observance of rules and rituals was necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate this fluid, animated ecosystem. Magical practices, deeply embedded in relational ontologies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Demonstrating one’s spiritual power through dramatic theatrics, based on deceptions and illusions, has long been the purview of ritual practitioners in their efforts to gain, legitimize, and maintain political and social advantages. Exclusive and secretive ritual sodalities, which often form the institutional framework for corporate-based magical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool. Brandon Massullo.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human cognition both enables and limits the ways humans can interact with spirits and forces that are typically unseen or that otherwise transcend the physical world. Research in psychology, anthropology, and related fields indicates that social and physical contexts are central to activating the cognitive frameworks that facilitate spirit-human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Burkett.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropology and archaeology strive not only to reconstruct the physical characteristics of the past world but to understand how past people thought about the world around them. The way people think gets encoded in magical frameworks in both physical objects like monuments and dwellings, as well as in less permanent expressions, like music,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cathy Costin.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although a shamanic component has long been recognized in Andean Formative cultures, recent research on Cupisnique (ca. 1200–900 BCE) ceramic iconography yields evidence for more varied, more prevalent, and much more far-reaching use of therapeutic and entheogenic substances during the early phases of Andean prehistory than has been previously...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Freidel. Juan Carlos Melendez.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya (CE 250–800) texts include a phrase k’a’ay u sak nikte’, faded his white flower, as a reference to the ending of the sweet breath of rulers and as a metaphor of their death. The breath—allegory of white flower—is evidently an allusion to soul force. Scholars identified on Tikal Stela 5 a reference for a White Flower Soul Container,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dennis Blanton.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Religious traditions follow historical trajectories. Within the archaeological record, processes of cosmological reorientation may be signaled by patterned change in attendant ritual paraphernalia. This kind of evolutionary process may be tracked in the American Southeast among certain late prehistoric, Mississippian societies, specifically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Bever.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the most common forms of divination in early modern Europe was magical treasure hunting. In an era before banks, locks, and police were common, people often buried or hid valuables, and sometimes knowledge of the location was lost. Some people later stumbled upon these caches accidentally, but others sought them out. Some treasure hunters...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Newman.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While it has been established that the Natives of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere employed a number of magical plants toward entheogenic ends (Barrier 2020; Rafferty 2021; Simon and Parker 2018), e.g., Nicotiana spp., Datura spp., Ipomoea spp., etc., the general consensus has been that the use of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, in the forms...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gavin Easley. Christine VanPool.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Death exists at the cornerstone of every culture. Each culture has death rituals through which humans seek to control the unknown. These rituals may focus on the event of dying and “crossing over” as dictated by each culture, but also include the role the dead might play even after their bodily death. Archaeologists have focused on mortuary ritual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine VanPool. Gavin Easley.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) is a defining characteristic of shamanism. ASC, however, is not unique to shamans nor is it a single neurological/physiological phenomenon. Mystics and mediums also use ASC, and mediums are even “possessed” to greater or lesser degrees. In contrast, most shamans go on soul flights during “ecstatic” trances....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This lecture will focus on the multifaceted world of shamanism. The presentation will show how shamans serve as vast repositories of traditional indigenous knowledge and native beliefs. The effectiveness of shamans as health care practitioners will be considered. The ingestion of mind altering substances by Amazonian shamans as part of their curing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only C Riley Auge.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Magic is essentially performative and heavily ritualized in its enactment whether wielded by specialized (e.g., shamans, cunning folk, alchemists) or lay practitioners. Each detail of the ritual performance not only works in tandem with all other aspects, but the details simultaneously connect with and draw upon cosmic forces as the agentic energy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Nieves Zedeño. Francois Lanoe.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We combine archaeology, oral history, and ethnography to argue for the epistemological power of visions and their complementary role—along with ontology and ordering schemes—in the fabric of Native American philosophies and practices. Waking visions and dreams are central to the long-term cultural history of Plains people. Among the Blackfoot, for...