Beyond Geographical Correlation in Ritual Landscape Studies: Archaeological Test of an Ethnographic Model Based on Ontological Beliefs About Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ritual landscape studies have been bedeviled by confusions of correlation with causation. Rock art sites in the North American desert west, for example, are often said to signal the locations of water, because the sites are (sometimes) found at springs. But this is a clear confusion of correlation with causation: anyone with desert experience can better identify water sources, from a distance, by vegetative vigor, eliminating the need for and logic of rock art motifs as signposts. We use a previously published ethnographic model of the ontological beliefs that structure ritual landscape perceptions to examine three rock art site localities in the southern Mojave Desert, California. This model identifies a series of specific landforms and locations of certain geophysical events as places thought especially imbued with supernatural knowledge-power and thus appropriate for ritual. Our three localities all conform to the expectations of this model, thereby both verifying its archaeological value and suggesting avenues for future predictive modeling in research and heritage management contexts, an especially great need now that renewable energy development is quickly turning the Mojave into a rural-industrial landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51401