Horizon Events: Hohokam Ritual Relations with the Distant and Phenomenal

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.

For well over a millennium, Hohokam communities in the southern Southwest dwelled in a terrain of perennial river valleys fringed by a horizon of jagged mountains. Villages and livelihoods were nestled on the valley floors near the rivers, leaving the uplands as an uninhabited periphery between the everyday experience and the phenomenally distant. These uplands were the realm of large animals and evergreens, and the interface between the terrestrial and the celestial—clouds and rain, lightning and thunder. This reach—beyond and above the village—was not unfamiliar, only untrammeled, and ritualism was an arena in which people continually negotiated their relationship with the distant places defining their horizon. This paper explores the range and social scale of ritual practices in which Hohokam communities engaged the outer reach of their landscape. The structure and composition of these practices attest to a relationship that was reflexively and cyclically constitutive, with people giving and taking while coming and going. Communities became woven into the landscape as people left pieces of themselves on the fringe and brought elements of the distant and phenomenal into the center.

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): 24674