Bringing the Landscape Home: The Materiality of Placemaking and Pilgrimage in Jornada Mogollon Settlement

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Among prehispanic and historic societies of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, mountains and caves had multivalent metaphorical and symbolic meanings relating to underworld, ancestors, water, and emergence. Mountains and caves are featured among origin and emergence myths and many contemporary Pueblo societies regard themselves as relationally constituted through such ideational landscapes. Symbolic and metaphorical representations were painted, carved, and modeled in many media, creating iconographic engagements with such beliefs. Other means of engagement with sacred landscapes include placemaking via shrines and rock art. Yet another critical form of engagement, one that is often overlooked, concerns the small material representations of sacred landscapes that were acquired during visits or pilgrimage journeys and transported back to settlements. These take the form of bundled associations of fossils, crystals, pigments, and speleothem often found in ritual depositional contexts. The bundled associations convey bundled meanings, forming material links between ritual spaces in settlements and the surrounding landscapes. These objects reference the "pieces of places" described by Bradley, whereby material objects retain the significance of their origins and come to represent those locations on the landscape. This paper examines these macroscale material linkages between sacred landscapes, placemaking, pilgrimage, and constructed spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22890