Ritual Closure: A Countermeasure to Witchcraft

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists routinely encounter ceremonially closed buildings and sites yet specific explanations about why this occurs and how to frame it remain murky. For the American Southwest and likely many other parts of the world, fear of witchcraft may explain these closures. We argue in this poster that ritual burning and the inclusion of materials in the deposits of closed pueblo villages counteracted potential dangers of things falling into the wrong hands. Among southwestern peoples, ashes serve as an antidote and prophylactic against spiritually dangerous powers. Similar powers reside in projectile points. Indeed, in the Southwest the agency of many objects such as shell, turquoise, fossils, and crystals likely conditioned their inclusion in closure deposits. We conceptualize these additions as a form of temper used in a ritual technology to process the closure of Cottonwood Spring Pueblo, a large El Paso phase (AD 1300–1450) village on the western flanks of the San Andres mountains of southern New Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32395