Analytical Approaches for Identifying Ritual Contexts

Summary

Paleoethnobotanists continue to push plants into the realm of social archaeology, particularly in terms of examining how plants articulated with ancient ritual practices. The examination of the connection between plants and ritual, however, is not a straightforward process—researchers must first appropriately identify special contexts and/or foods, after which they must attribute meaning to the contexts and events they have identified. This presentation focuses on the first step – identification of ritual plant deposits, using the plant assemblage as the means of definition. I discuss several analytical approaches and quantitative methods for achieving this goal while also highlighting relevant case studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Use of Plants in Ancient Rituals: New Perspectives from Paleoethnobotany   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15348