Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes

Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes
Author: Joel W. Palka
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2014-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0826354750

Pilgrimage to ritually significant places is a part of daily life in the Maya world. These journeys involve important social and practical concerns, such as the maintenance of food sources and world order. Frequent pilgrimages to ceremonial hills to pay offerings to spiritual forces for good harvests, for instance, are just as necessary for farming as planting fields. Why has Maya pilgrimage to ritual landscapes prevailed from the distant past and why are journeys to ritual landscapes important in Maya religion? How can archaeologists recognize Maya pilgrimage, and how does it compare to similar behavior at ritual landscapes around the world? The author addresses these questions and others through cross-cultural comparisons, archaeological data, and ethnographic insights.

Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa

Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa
Author: J. Cameron Monroe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-02-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107009391

"This volume applies insights drawn from the theories and methods of landscape archaeology to contribute to our understanding of the nature if West African societies in the Atlantic Era (17th-19th Centuries AD). The authors adopt a briad set of methods and approaches to tackle how the nature and structures of African political and social relations changed across regions in this period. This is only the second volume in a decade to focus on the archeology of this period in West Africa, and the first volume in sub-Saharan Africanist archeology to be focused in the recent past in oue sub-region of the continent from a coherent methodological and theoretical standpoint"--Provided by publisher.

The Oxford Handbook of the Incas

The Oxford Handbook of the Incas
Author: Sonia Alconini
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 881
Release: 2018-04-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 019021936X

When Spaniards invaded their realm in 1532, the Incas ruled the largest empire of the pre-Columbian Americas. Just over a century earlier, military campaigns began to extend power across a broad swath of the Andean region, bringing local societies into new relationships with colonists and officials who represented the Inca state. With Cuzco as its capital, the Inca empire encompassed a multitude of peoples of diverse geographic origins and cultural traditions dwelling in the outlying provinces and frontier regions. Bringing together an international group of well-established scholars and emerging researchers, this handbook is dedicated to revealing the origins of this empire, as well as its evolution and aftermath. Chapters break new ground using innovative multidisciplinary research from the areas of archaeology, ethnohistory and art history. The scope of this handbook is comprehensive. It places the century of Inca imperial expansion within a broader historical and archaeological context, and then turns from Inca origins to the imperial political economy and institutions that facilitated expansion. Provincial and frontier case studies explore the negotiation and implementation of state policies and institutions, and their effects on the communities and individuals that made up the bulk of the population. Several chapters describe religious power in the Andes, as well as the special statuses that staffed the state religion, maintained records, served royal households, and produced fine craft goods to support state activities. The Incas did not disappear in 1532, and the volume continues into the Colonial and later periods, exploring not only the effects of the Spanish conquest on the lives of the indigenous populations, but also the cultural continuities and discontinuities. Moving into the present, the volume ends will an overview of the ways in which the image of the Inca and the pre-Columbian past is memorialized and reinterpreted by contemporary Andeans.

The Humanities in a World Upside-Down

The Humanities in a World Upside-Down
Author: Ignacio López-Calvo
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1527512150

Following the metaphor of “the world upside-down,” this essay collection highlights the importance of the humanities in addressing, along with the sciences, pressing challenges in today’s rapidly changing world. Crossing across a variety of disciplines, historical periods, and regions in the world, this volume represents a useful tool for humanities scholars and students exploring the key role of our disciplines in public debates about pressing issues, such as the refugee crisis, climate change denialism, environmental justice, racism, and the current worldwide crisis of democracy. It provides practical examples of how societies throughout the world have historically coped with unexpected and distressing changes in government, core values, axiomatic systems, assumptions, beliefs, ideology, or cultural constructions. The feeling of topsy-turvy consternation as a result of sudden, harrowing change, as is shown here, is not new; rather, it has simply evolved throughout time and space.

Ritual Landscape and Performance

Ritual Landscape and Performance
Author: Christina Geisen
Publisher: Yale Egyptology
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1950343138

Ritual Landscape and Performance contains the peer-reviewed Egyptological contributions from the homonymous conference held at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of Yale University on September 23-24, 2016. The various articles discuss the use of ritual landscape from the Old to the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, by focusing on landscape archaeology of specific sites such as Saqqara, el-Bersheh, Abydos, Thebes, as well as Aniba in Nubia. Further contributions elucidate the interaction of desert and the Nile Valley through rock art, the depictions of watery environments in the delta and their association to rituals, as well as the habitation of landscapes using the example of southern Middle Egypt.

Construction of Maya Space

Construction of Maya Space
Author: Thomas H. Guderjan
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081655188X

Construction of Maya Spaces sheds new light on how Maya society may have shaped—and been shaped by—the constructed environment. Moving beyond the towering pyramids and temples often associated with Maya spaces, this volume focuses on how those in power used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power, and how the powerless pushed back. Through fifteen engaging chapters, contributors examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya elite and nonelite peoples to understand how they used spaces differently. Through cutting-edge methodologies and case studies, chapters consider how and why Maya people connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places such as caves, and across their regions to inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past. Contributors Elias Alcocer Puerto Alejandra Alonso Olvera Traci Ardren Jaime J. Awe Alejandra Badillo Sánchez Nicolas C. Barth Grace Lloyd Bascopé Adolpho Iván Batún-Alpuche Elizabeth Beckner M. Kathryn Brown Bernadette Cap Miguel Covarrubias Reyna Juan Fernandez Diaz Alberto G. Flores Colin Thomas H. Guderjan C. Colleen Hanratty Héctor Hernández Álvarez Scott R. Hutson Joshua J. Kwoka Whitney Lytle Aline Magnoni Jennifer P. Mathews Stephanie J. Miller Shawn G. Morton Holley Moyes Shannon Plank Dominique Rissolo Patrick Rohrer Carmen Rojas Sandoval Justine M. Shaw J. Gregory Smith Travis W. Stanton Karl A. Taube Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz

Buddhist Landscapes in Central India

Buddhist Landscapes in Central India
Author: Julia Shaw
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1029
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315432633

The “monumental bias” of Buddhist archaeology has hampered our understanding of the socio-religious mechanisms that enabled early Buddhist monks to establish themselves in new areas. To articulate these relationships, Shaw presents here the first integrated study of settlement archaeology and Buddhist history, carried out in the area around Sanchi, a Central Indian UNESCO World Heritage site. Her comprehensive, data-rich, and heavily illustrated work provides an archaeological basis for assessing theories regarding the dialectical relationship between Buddhism and surrounding lay populations. It also sheds light on the role of the introduction of Buddhism in changing settlement patterns.This volume was originally published in 2007 by the British Association of South Asian Studies.

Growing the Taraco Peninsula

Growing the Taraco Peninsula
Author: Maria C. Bruno
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2024-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1646426134

Growing the Taraco Peninsula is an examination of long-term human-environmental interactions through agriculture among Indigenous communities of the Taraco Peninsula, Bolivia, located on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the Andes. Maria Bruno weaves together ethnographic observations of modern-day Aymara farming practices with an in-depth study of archaeological remains, particularly plants, to examine the development of agricultural landscapes through time. Beginning with the first small-scale communities of the Formative period (1500 BCE–500 CE) through the development of the Tiwanaku state (500–1100 CE), Bruno draws upon ethnographic insights from modern-day Indigenous farming practices on the peninsula as well as archaeological evidence from excavations at four sites to explore the landscapes and human-plant relationships that Taraco communities created through their agricultural practices. Through evaluation of environmental data on climate and land-use dynamics—rainfall, lake level, and soil character and distribution—she proposes a new hypothesis of how raised-field agriculture may have emerged in the region. With a detailed analysis of foodways at the Kala Uyuni site, her study reveals how Indigenous Taraco communities sustainably incorporated crops and wild plants into their daily and special-occasion meals, connecting the agricultural landscapes to local and regional social and political dynamics. Bringing together several indicators of the region’s long-term history and demonstrating that shifts in agriculture do not neatly correspond to the changes traditionally highlighted by archaeological culture histories, Growing the Taraco Peninsula reveals Indigenous landscape creation through farming on the Taraco peninsula as a critical example of sustainability. This valuable contribution to Andean archaeology is also of interest to scholars, students, and the general reader concerned about the environment, sustainable farming, sustainability, Andean history, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Tongnaab

Tongnaab
Author: Jean Allman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2005-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253111838

For many Africanist historians, traditional religion is simply a starting point for measuring the historic impact of Christianity and Islam. In Tongnaab, Jean Allman and John Parker challenge the distinction between tradition and modernity by tracing the movement and mutation of the powerful Talensi god and ancestor shrine, Tongnaab, from the savanna of northern Ghana through the forests and coastal plains of the south. Using a wide range of written, oral, and iconographic sources, Allman and Parker uncover the historical dynamics of cross-cultural religious belief and practice. They reveal how Tongnaab has been intertwined with many themes and events in West African history -- the slave trade, colonial conquest and rule, capitalist agriculture and mining, labor migration, shifting ethnicities, the production of ethnographic knowledge, and the political projects that brought about the modern nation state. This rich and original book shows that indigenous religion has been at the center of dramatic social and economic changes stretching from the slave trade to the tourist trade.

Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research

Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research
Author: Heidrun Stebergløkken
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2015-10-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1784911593

Ritual landscapes and borders are recurring themes running through Professor Kalle Sognnes' long research career. This anthology contains 13 articles written by colleagues from his broad network in appreciation of his many contributions to the field of rock art research.