Landscapes of Ritual Performance in Eastern North America

Landscapes of Ritual Performance in Eastern North America
Author: Cheryl Claassen
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2023-02-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789259304

In the long history of documenting the material culture of the archaeological record, meaning and actions of makers and users of these items is often overlooked. The authors in this book focus on rituals exploring the natural and made landscape stages, the ritual directors, including their progression from shaman to priesthood, and meaning of the rites. They also provide comments on the end or failure of rites and cults from Paleoindian into post-DeSoto years. Chapters examine the archaeological records of Cahokia, the lower Ohio Valley, Aztalan Wisconsin, Vermont, Florida, and Georgia, and others scan the Eastern US, investigating tobacco/datura, color symbolism, deer symbolism, mound stratigraphy, flintknapping, stone caching, cults and their organization, and red ochre. These authors collectively query the beliefs that can be gleaned from mortuary practices and their variation, from mound construction, from imagery, from the choice of landscape setting. While some rituals were short-lived, others can be shown to span millennia as the ritual specialists modified their interpretations and introduced innovations.

Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast

Early and Middle Woodland Landscapes of the Southeast
Author: Alice P. Wright
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Adena culture
ISBN: 9780813044606

Integrates empirical data with social structural notions such as persistent, ritual, cultural, and social places, striving to explore the totality of landscape experiences across temporal and spatial spaces in the American Southeast.

The Archaeology of Ritual

The Archaeology of Ritual
Author: Evangelos Kyriakidis
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2007-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1938770390

A wide spectrum of scholars, historians, art historians, anthropologists, students of performance, students of religion, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists were all asked to think and comment on how ritual can be traced in archaeology and which ways ritual research can go in that discipline. The product is a fairly accurate representation of research on ritual and the archaeology of ritual: scholars from various disciplines, backgrounds and agendas, arguing mostly in the most logical fashion, yet with little agreement between them. So this book should not be seen as presenting one unified attitude towards ritual and its study in archaeology. It should rather be seen as a reflection of what the discourse in the archaeology of ritual is today. The outcome has been extremely thought-provoking, often controversial, but always of extremely high quality.

Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic

Field Manual for the Archaeology of Ritual, Religion, and Magic
Author: C. Riley Augé
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2022-07-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1805399063

By bringing together in one place specific objects, materials, and features indicating ritual, religious, or magical belief used by people around the world and through time, this tool will assist archaeologists in identifying evidence of belief-related behaviors and broadening their understanding of how those behaviors may also be seen through less obvious evidential lines. Instruction and templates for recording, typologizing, classifying, and analyzing ritual or magico-religious material culture are also provided to guide researchers in the survey, collection, and cataloging processes. The bulleted formatting and topical range make this a highly accessible work, while providing an incredible wealth of information in a single volume.

Hidden Thunder

Hidden Thunder
Author: Geri Schrab
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0870207679

In Hidden Thunder, archaeologist Robert "Ernie" Boszhardt and renowned watercolor artist Geri Schrab give readers an upcloseandpersonal look at rock art. With an eye toward preservation, Schrab and Boszhardt take you with them as they research, document, and interpret the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs made my Native Americans in past millennia. In addition to publicly accessible sites such as Minnesota's Jeffers Petroglyphs and Wisconsin's RocheaCri State Park, Hidden Thunder covers the artistic treasures found at several remote and inaccessible rock art sites--revealing the ancient stories through words, fullcolor photographs, and artistic renditions.

Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief

Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief
Author: Stephen B. Carmody
Publisher: University Alabama Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0817320423

Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpretin g Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices. Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents. Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000–7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas. Contributors Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright

Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Author: Christopher Carr
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 1564
Release: 2022-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030449173

This book, in two volumes, breathes fresh air empirically, methodologically, and theoretically into understanding the rich ceremonial lives, the philosophical-religious knowledge, and the impressive material feats and labor organization that distinguish Hopewell Indians of central Ohio and neighboring regions during the first centuries CE. The first volume defines cross-culturally, for the first time, the “ritual drama” as a genre of social performance. It reconstructs and compares parts of 14 such dramas that Hopewellian and other Woodland-period peoples performed in their ceremonial centers to help the soul-like essences of their deceased make the journey to an afterlife. The second volume builds and critiques ten formal cross-cultural models of “personhood” and the “self” and infers the nature of Scioto Hopewell people’s ontology. Two facets of their ontology are found to have been instrumental in their creating the intercommunity alliances and cooperation and gathering the labor required to construct their huge, multicommunity ceremonial centers: a relational, collective concept of the self defined by the ethical quality of the relationships one has with other beings, and a concept of multiple soul-like essences that compose a human being and can be harnessed strategically to create familial-like ethical bonds of cooperation among individuals and communities. The archaeological reconstructions of Hopewellian ritual dramas and concepts of personhood and the self, and of Hopewell people’s strategic uses of these, are informed by three large surveys of historic Woodland and Plains Indians’ narratives, ideas, and rites about journeys to afterlives, the creatures who inhabit the cosmos, and the nature and functions of soul-like essences, coupled with rich contextual archaeological and bioarchaeological-taphonomic analyses. The bioarchaeological-taphonomic method of l’anthropologie de terrain, new to North American archaeology, is introduced and applied. In all, the research in this book vitalizes a vision of an anthropology committed to native logic and motivation and skeptical of the imposition of Western world views and categories onto native peoples.

Culture and the Question of Rights

Culture and the Question of Rights
Author: Charles Zerner
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2003-04-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780822328131

DIVA collection of ethnographic studies into the nature of power, language, and cultural politics within the context of Southeast Asian environments./div

Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East

Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East
Author: Ömür Harmanşah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2013-03-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1107311187

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.