Veneration and Pilgrimage at a Hinterland Shrine: Evidence from the Medicinal Trail Community, Northwestern Belize

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Data recovered from excavation of the residential Tapir Group at the Maya hinterland site of Medicinal Trail provides evidence for ancestor veneration and pilgrimage. For veneration, the Maya incorporated ancestors into their built environment through the ritual practice of physically including them in the architecture as burials within or beneath the structures. Pilgrimage is defined as a social process or an act of visiting a sacred place for practical and/or spiritual purposes. Postclassic pilgrimages are of particular interest in light of the Classic Period Collapse of the southern and central lowlands beginning around AD 900. The abandonment left the ancestors in large ceremonial site centers as well as hinterland communities. Pilgrimage theories have proposed that these journeys were perhaps multipurpose, and that they were combined with veneration. This paper will demonstrate that the eastern structure at the Tapir Group functioned as an ancestral shrine and that a pilgrimage occurred at the shrine.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25292