Magic When It Matters the Most: Intensification of Tobacco Ritual during the Late Mississippian Period of the American Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Religious traditions follow historical trajectories. Within the archaeological record, processes of cosmological reorientation may be signaled by patterned change in attendant ritual paraphernalia. This kind of evolutionary process may be tracked in the American Southeast among certain late prehistoric, Mississippian societies, specifically in relation to tobacco-oriented ritual. The case will be made for a trend of increasingly sectarian practice bolstered by a profusion of formalized, magico-religious invocations. This shift attends fundamental change in socio-political structure. The process of cosmological reformulation is empirically derived from examination of the numbers, attributes, and contexts of smoking pipe artifacts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38189.0