The Ontological Mammoth Body: Varieties of the Human-Mammoth Ritual Drama Mediated by Cultural Interactions with Mammoth Remains in Pavlonian Moravia and Mezinian Ukraine

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethnohistoric sources show hunters burnt the bones of prey or hung them on trees, heaped them on piles, deposited them in bogs, etc., in order to propitiate nature spirits such as the “Master of Animals” for game resurrection and renewal. Animals were not mere prey but partners to hunters. Animal body parts could be used to attain spiritual potency and even increase human fertility. In the highly cooperative society of hunters, everyday life included festivities and rituals, an important part of which might have been the deposition of as wide a sample of bones from the kill as possible. Nevertheless, archaeozoologists persevere in ignoring these facts. However, we see the Mammoth Steppe of the Moravian Pavlovian (32–22 ky BP) and Ukrainian Mezinian (20–13 ky BP) as a “shamanistic” landscape for the ritual drama of the hunt and ontological interplay between humans and mammoths with evidence for religious beliefs and acts in a vast array of material cultural correlates; many of these in the form of modified mammoth remains, including monumental architecture, that comprise one of our species’ most ancient, elaborate religious complexes, and serve as a model for the interpretation and reconstruction of religious doctrines and ritual in archaeological societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39156.0