Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ritual closure, structured deposits, and related ceremonially charged strata, once controversial inferences, are now expected in many archaeological contexts. In the past, ritual and religious explanations received lower priority in archaeological studies; however, more recently, archaeologists have used them to provide robust explanations of stratigraphic evidence in burned and buried houses, temples, earthworks, shrines, and other features across the globe. Scholars in this symposium offer case studies from around the world including Africa, West Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and North, Central, and South America. This global perspective begs new questions such as: How can we track migration through ritual closure practices? How can we elaborate or add to classifications such as foundation and closure/termination deposits? What is the relationship between materials in charged strata and exchange networks? Do charged deposits mark social changes associated with climate change? Clearly these and other questions require a broad comparison of cultures in different places and scales of social organization. In this symposium we begin such study.

Other Keywords
Architecture • Ritual and Symbolism • Taphonomy and Site Formation • Worldwide

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Burying Buildings: Ritual Closure as Mortuary Practice (or not) in the Ancient Andes? (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Nash.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual Closures, temple interments, and construction offerings are a common occurrence in the Prehispanic Andes region of South America. This practice became more elaborate overtime, and societies selected a wide range of goods for inclusion as offerings, which in some cases included human sacrifices or were accompanied by ancestral remains. Given...

  • Burying Houses as a Ritual of Closure and Renewal. Two Cases from Bohemia (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Martin Kuna.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology in Central Europe is increasingly aware that finds from prehistoric sites may reflect not only the original functions of settlement features, but also the human activities that followed after their practical use ceased. Deposits resulting from the abandonment and/or destruction of settlement features often contain indications of ritual...

  • Compositional Practice in Turbulent Times: Investigating Ritually Charged Deposits in a West African Metallurgical Workshop (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Stahl.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The workshops of West African metallurgists were transformative locations where metals were forged and tools fabricated, at the same time as they were sites of problem-solving through divination, soothsaying and healing. The social and knowledge networks of skilled metallurgists often reached beyond those of fellow community members and their...

  • Interpreting Ritual Deposits at a Multiethnic Site in Spanish Colonial New Mexico (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jenks.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting evidence of ritual practices can be especially challenging in colonial contexts, where people, plants, animals, and materials from various places are forced into direct, sustained contact. In eighteenth-century New Mexico, centuries of Spanish colonialism produced a multiethnic, socially stratified population of agropastoralists who...

  • Linking Communities in Time and Space: Mound Building Practices in the Lower Mississippi Valley and Beyond (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Megan Kassabaum.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around 5500 BCE and continuing through today, groups throughout the American South created their communities in part through mound building. Recent large-scale reviews of data from excavations at pre-contact earthen mound sites have allowed for a number of repeated practices of construction, use, modification, and abandonment to be...

  • Pueblo Closure: Migration and Exchange in an Animate World (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Closure ceremonies and other rites of passage rituals mark the lives of buildings and can track the movements of peoples. In the Puebloan southwest these are common components of the archaeological record whose rich information remains relatively untapped. In this paper, we compare closure practices across Jornada Mogollon pueblos during the El Paso...

  • Ritual Closure at Point of Pines Pueblo: Forgetting Immigrant Identity and Creating a New Community (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Lyons.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with Emil Haury’s (1958) brief article on the burning of the Maverick Mountain room block at Point of Pines Pueblo, archaeologists have consistently interpreted this process as an incident of inter-ethnic violence perpetrated by the locals in the Point of Pines region in order to drive away the Kayenta immigrants who had settled at the...

  • Ritual Closure on the Fremont Frontier (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katie Richards.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For roughly 1000 years, the far northern extent of the cultural North American Southwest reached into Utah, inhabited by peoples we refer to as the Fremont. During the Fremont Late Period (ca. A.D. 1000–1300), many structures across the vast region were intentionally burned and buried with specific ritual artifacts including figurines, gaming...

  • Ritual termination and rejection of the status quo in Mesoamerica. (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Hart.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual termination events are a routine religious practice throughout much Mesoamerica. As part of the world renewing religious perspective, they can involve a wide range of objects from the smallest incensarios to large, monumental structures such as pyramids. However, an important distinction remains to be analyzed, terminations that are part of...

  • The Significance of Stones: Ritual Reuse of Hearthstones and Monuments in Early Medieval Wales (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Para.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early medieval Wales was a fragmented political landscape, and the threat of incomers from Ireland and Scotland led to an increased sense of urgency amongst the Welsh uchelwyr (elites) to retain their hold on the land. To that end, ancient standing stone monuments were given secondary function as property boundary stones, lending legitimacy to land...

  • Understanding Ritual Events within the Architectural Context of Building on a Cumulative Construct: The Case of the Çatalhöyük East Mound (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Defne Bozkurt.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Looking at closure, abandonment and subsequent foundation events as interlinked and sometimes overlapping actions, opens the door to questioning rituals and ‘rules,’ and asking whether ritual emerges from practice or hovers above daily pragmatism. The Çatalhöyük East Mound (7100-5950 BCE), a deeply cumulative settlement in Central Anatolia, with...

  • Women and Menarche Lodges: Archaeological Evidence of Coming-of-Age Structures on the Columbia-Fraser Plateau (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Molly Carney.

    This is an abstract from the "Ritual Closure: A Global Perspective" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Women’s or menarche lodges are non-domestic structures noted within North American ethnographies as the places where a young girl spent her first menses, learning from the women around her as she moved into the next life stage. On the Columbia-Fraser Plateau, our previous work identified a small, burned structure with few artifacts, rubified...