Religious Practices of Pre-Columbian Pacific Nicaragua

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Colonial period ethnohistorical sources recorded the religious practices of the Contact period Nicarao of Pacific Nicaragua, including a pantheon of deities, use of a ritual calendar, and other ceremonies. These were closely affiliated with the religion of Nahua central Mexico, linked to the purported migration of Nahuat-speakers into the region in the final centuries prior to European contact. Relatively little information, however, was provided about the religious practices of other ethnic groups in the cultural mosaic of Postclassic Nicaragua, and no historical sources are available for earlier time periods. This paper will summarize what can be gleaned from archaeological evidence from the 2000 years of pre-Columbian prehistory, with particular reference to mortuary practices, ceramic figurines, iconography, stone sculpture, and petroglyphs. The implication based on these data is for an animistic/shamanistic religion without recognizable ‘deities,’ a spirituality tied to natural elements, at least for societies pre-dating the alleged Mexican migrations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24785