Nourishing the Ancestors among the Zapotecs, Valley of Oaxaca

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From 500 BCE onwards, religion in the Valley of Oaxaca was organized in part as an ancestor cult as materialized by the appearance of household tombs in the archaeological record. Heads of households were laid to rest for a number of generations with offerings consisting most often of ceramic vessels, which in domestic contexts were used to serve food and liquid. Nourishing the souls on their journey to and residence in the underworld was basic to Zapotec worldview whereby the spirits of family member were perceived to act as intermediaries between the living and the supernatural. This paper considers the material and symbolic dimension of nourishing the ancestors by looking at the food remains recovered from tombs, mortuary practices recorded in the ethnographic literature and contemporary practices among traditional communities in the Valley of Oaxaca.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25537