Ritual Sites Research Articles

Infrastructure and interpretation: Meters, dams, and state imagination in Scotland and India

ABSTRACTThe technical infrastructures of modern life—energy, communications, transport—stand at the juncture between material orderings of society and collective meaning. Public utilities are both material and symbolic, and both aspects require maintenance—and anthropological understanding. However, recent anthropological approaches building from science studies have tended to pursue “flat” descriptions that replace mystical or hypostatizing concepts of “social forces” with material associations and have focused on micrological discipline rather than ritual sites where collective identity is formed. By contrast, I identify an “aporetic relation” between material ordering and symbolic form as the site of ritual, and hermeneutic, processes by which large‐scale political collectives are built up—and infrastructures are shaped to serve collective projects. I analyze examples of contemporary and historical infrastructural politics from India and Scotland to develop insights into how collectivities and states are formed, interpreted, and challenged in symbolic contests over their infrastructures.

“In the Church and in the Chapel”

Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary. This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants. The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars' dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out

A ritual site with sacrificial wells from the Viking Age at Trelleborg, Denmark

The promontory facing Storebaelt with the well-known circular Viking Age military fortress of Trelleborg erected by Harold Bluetooth in AD 980/981 seems to have been an important ceremonial space prior to the erection of the fortress and contemporary with a nearby high status settlement dated to the seventh to the eleventh century. This study presents new cross-disciplinary investigations focusing on three sacrificial well-like structures (47, 50 and 121) from the pre-Christian Viking Age at Trelleborg. Two of the sacrificial wells (47 and 121) included the only skeletal remains of four children hitherto recovered from Danish Viking Age wells. The strontium isotope results of the four children point to local provenance. However, the results of each well seem to pair up in a systematic way pointing to that the children might come from two different key surrounding areas at Trelleborg. Furthermore, the three wells contained animal remains of primarily domestic livestock partly representing consumption waste ...

The Pre-Roman Cult Site at Hayling Island, Hampshire, GB: The Problem of Characterizing an Anonymous Deity

Excavations in the 1970s, 1980s and 2001 have revealed an important pre-Roman Iron Age temple site in southern Britain. It was succeeded by a circular Romano-Celtic temple, c. 70 AD, and eventually by a Saxon ritual site of the 8th century AD. The pre-Roman temple was constructed of timber in the early 1st century BC, at first with an open-air plan, but later, c. 10 AD, in the form of a circular wooden shrine. The surrounding temenos contained a large quantity of votive offerings, including animal bones, pottery, military items, brooches and coins. However, no images of a deity, or inscriptions (from the Roman phase) survive, to allow us to be certain of the cult at this shrine. Consequently, we have to look for parallels to the architecture and layout of the site, and to the assemblage of votive material, in order to characterize the anonymous deity at Hayling Island. The best parallels come from western Gaul, and the evidence from there suggests that the site may be linked to a Mars-type deity, analogous to Mars Mullo.

3D imaging of Skoteino Cave, Crete, Greece: Successes and difficulties

Interpreting cave use, especially from antiquity, requires the perception of subterranean space in all dimensions (floor to ceiling to lateral extent) including spatial variability resulting from geological factors. Subterranean conditions, coupled with variable atmospheric conditions, create a special environment not readily conveyed by conventional mapping techniques limited to two-dimensional floor plans. Skoteino Cave in north central Crete, Greece was used as a ritual and refuge site in the Bronze Age and later. Mapping of the cave attempted to depict and interpret prehistoric and historical use of this space by employing two mapping techniques: EDM total station mapping and terrestrial/point cloud laser scanning. Comparisons with earlier methods used to map cave show the advantages and disadvantages of various mapping schemes. To date, this was the first use of three-dimensional (3D) scanning to explore the complex shapes and space of a subterranean archaeological site on Crete (and the second such use in Greece), and this use demonstrates its own consequent successes and difficulties.

BURIAL PRACTICES AND RITUAL LANDSCAPES AT PTOLEMAIC ABYDOS: The 2011 and 2012 Seasons of the Abydos Middle Cemetery Project

Abydos, one of the oldest mortuary and ritual sites in Egypt, is an important case study for studying social changes in Egyptian society during the Late and Ptolemaic periods. The 2011–12 seasons of the University of Michigan's Abydos Middle Cemetery project focused on material remains of these periods, excavating an elite Ptolemaic-period tomb and a range of subsidiary architecture near the traditional processional route. Social status was communicated through association with that route. Soon after the construction of this complex, there appears to have been a shift both in preferred areas for burial and the ritual landscape, as the traditional processional route was blocked by graves. This marked a distinct shift in the ritual landscape and in how people defined themselves in relation to it.

The Ritualization of Rehabilitation

There is widespread and increasing political interest in devising plans to support people who have or have had cancer to recover and recommence ‘normal’ lives. Educating cancer patients for this purpose is a central element in cancer rehabilitation in both Europe and the United States. One of the challenges in intervention research pertaining to rehabilitation is how to measure and explain the effects of a particular rehabilitation program. The social processes of particular programs are often a ‘closed box’ and not taken into consideration methodologically or analytically. In this article, we unpack and explicate the ‘closed box’ of a particular cancer rehabilitation program in Denmark by drawing on approaches from the study of ritual. By analyzing rehabilitation as a ritual and as ritualization, we identify and conceptualize some of the transformative activities involved in cancer rehabilitation. We highlight the significance of the ritual site, its aesthetics, its exaggerations, and the social and temporal organization of the program.

Pilgrims past and present: the ritual landscape of Raqchi, southern Peru

In 1533 the Spanish overthrew the Inka1 empire that then dominated the Andean region and much of the west coast of South America. Most tourists going to Peru visit Cuzco and Machu Pichu, but few see any of the other spectacular Ink a ruins, such as the mythical and ritual site at Raqchi. There research is focusing on the site itself and on the long-term history of the Vilcanota Valley, including the changes wrought by the Spanish invasion. The project is also working with the local community to promote sustainable tourism.

Upper Paleolithic Rock Crystal Artifacts from the Southeastern Shore of Lake Bolshiye Allaki, the Southern Urals

Artifacts from the second cultural horizon of Bolshiye Allaki-2 are described, and data on the topography and stratigraphy of the site are examined. Results of technological, typological, petrographic, and faunal analyses along with radiocarbon dates suggest that this may be the earliest Upper Paleolithic ritual site in the Urals.

X-ray fluorescence analysis and intra-island exchange in the Society Island archipelago (Central Eastern Polynesia)

We apply X-ray fluorescence (XRF) geochemical analysis to a collection of 'Opunohu Valley lithic artifacts from Mo'orea island to investigate the local scale of raw material procurement, adze production, use, and exchange within the Society Island archipelago. We use these data to document the distribution of non-local versus local volcanic artifacts in 'Opunohu Valley house sites, ritual sites, and specialized sites, as a means for establishing intra-site production and consumption patterns, and access to exotic, possibly superior, stone resources, and how these two themes correlate with site function or household wealth and status. Overall, 30% of the artifacts analyzed via WDXRF derive from non-local sources, notably two other islands in the archipelago outside of the political boundaries of Moorean chiefdoms. Our case study thus provides the first direct material evidence of intra-archipelago trade and exchange in the Society Islands. Intra-archipelago trade in adzes was certainly in place by as early as A.D. 1350, if not earlier, and continued up until the time of European contact. In addition, our analyses have identified a local adze production locale in the Afareaitu district of Mo'orea island. The patterns of local versus non-local adze production and exchange strongly suggest that dual interaction spheres were involved. The correlation between adzes and adze-related debris produced from off-island sources and sites with specialized use, which were often reserved for the social, ritual, and political elites in Ma'ohi society suggests that some of the exotic adzes derived from gift exchange between Mo'orea and ruling elites in Tahiti and the Leeward Islands. These adzes from afar would have solidified socio-political and ideological alliances between elites in the Windward and Leeward sectors of the archipelago.

Editor’s Column

Editor’s Column John Zemke May 3, 2013 marked the first anniversary of the loss of John Miles Foley and a period of mourning at the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. This issue proffers to you, the readers, additional evidence of one dimension of John’s extraordinary legacy, the establishment and nurturing for more than a quarter of a century of Oral Tradition. We open with Nina Livesey’s study of Romans 4:9–12, a dialogue between the apostle Paul and a fictitious Jewish teacher whose interpretation vexed scholarly analysis concerned with the ethnic identity of the people mentioned in Rom 4:12. At issue is the presence of a purportedly “anomalous” dative article that New Testament scholars have resolved on grammatical, ideological, or theological grounds by simple deletion. Drawing on Hellenistic authors’ attentiveness to euphony and sound mapping techniques systematized by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott, Livesey identifies six structural periods coinciding with the passage’s dialogical form and elaborates compelling analyses of them. The map of acoustic patterns identifies recurring sound groups that provide an overarching structure within which certain recurrent metonyms, particularly terms for “circumcised” and “foreskinned,” are located. The placement and prominence of the sound patterns authenticate the legitimacy of the dative article and direct attention toward the sense of the passage, rhetorically framing the apostle Paul’s assurance to the Gentiles that the uncircumcised may by faith be legitimate heirs to Abrahamic rectitude since God declared Abraham righteous before his circumcision. Next, four successive articles cluster around the theme Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities of the 2010 World Oral Literature Project workshop. Under the aegis of Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, the workshop explored professional and ethical issues entailed by the dissemination of oral arts through traditional and digital media. First in this group, Carole Pegg and Erkinova Elizaveta Yamaeva report and interpret fieldwork with Altaian speakers in their practice of Ak Jang (“White Way”) rituals. Biannual spring and fall rituals at the küree (“place of gatherings”) temple complex in a recondite locale above the village are conducted for the purpose of maintaining universal order and tranquility, clan and family harmony, and personal happiness. Led by ritual specialists who are expert in ancient Altaian epic and unfolding in pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases, the ceremonies connect participants with historico-mythical space and time while also anchoring them in the present, creating a phenomenological, topographic space; a numinous performance space, and a sense of “being-in-place.” This sense of being-in-place emanates from the worshippers’ awareness that earth, mountains, sky, ancestors, epic heroes, temple complex, gods, planets, kin, and community are all living entities that ground Altaian personhood. Participants report experiencing “the arrival of energy and good fortune encircling them with a constantly rotating belt.” An eCompanion presents photos of ritual sites and worshippers. Next, John Meza Cuero tells Margaret Field a trickster tale in the Tipaay dialect of the Kumeyaay language (and in Spanish) in Baja California, Mexico, prompting a joint reflection on ethical questions regarding a cultural group’s preferences for usage of audio or video recordings of the community’s heritage. For instance, in Mexico a prevailing “variationist” attitude that accords all dialects of Kumeyaay equal status appears to warrant the sharing of traditional verbal arts with outsiders while in the United States a “localist” language ideology keeps intangible heritage exclusively within the Kumeyaay community. Tale-telling doubly indexes group identity—the larger community by the tale and the local community by its idiom—and the authors urge researchers to maintain balance in intra-communal interests by judiciously publishing recordings from various dialect groups. Without such precautions unintended language standardization may undermine language revitalization schemes, and specific groups may perceive diminished local prestige with corrosive effects on collaboration. A video-taped performance of the Rabbit and Frog tale told by John Meza Cuero is available in an eCompanion for the viewer’s delectation. A Rajasthani folk epic, Pabuji ki par/phad (“Pabuji with the scroll”), is the focus for Elizabeth Wickett’s study of some of the consequences visited on oral tradition by the explosion in modern...

Bones, teeth, and estimating age of perinates: Carthaginian infant sacrifice revisited

Writing about the ‘Tophet’, a children's cemetery in Carthage, Smithet al.argued in these pages that the age distribution of the children peaks at 1–1.49 months, supplying “another link in the chain of evidence—funerary practices, texts, iconography—that supports the interpretation of the Phoenician Tophets as ritual sites set aside for infant sacrifice” (2011: 871). In this they had challenged Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues, who previously argued (2010) that “skeletal remains from Punic Carthage do not support systematic sacrifice of infants”. Here Schwartzet al.restate their position forAntiquityreaders, showing that the verdict on the Phoenician practice of child sacrifice is, at best, not proven.

GÖK TÜRK HEYKELLERİ NE ZAMAN YONTULUYOR VE DİKİLİYORLARDI? (KÜL TİGİN'İN KARISININ HEYKEL PARÇASI ÖRNEĞİ İLE BİR BAKIŞ)

There are big differences in the way of sculpting technique between agrarian and nomadic cultures. Empires like Assurs, Hittites, Romans and Greeks, sculptures were mostly erected in honor of gods, goddesses, emperors and sometimes just plain people. But in nomadic cultures especially in the Gok Turk period, statues represent only the dead person (both men and women). Again Gok Turk statues were not found to be erected in temples, backyards or on the streets, but only in cultic sides where shaman performed a ritual for the soul of dead man or woman. Some of those Gok Turk statues show very strong portrait features. Since there is no name carved on them we do not know whom they belonged to, but probably in their time people were aware of that. Contemporary Turkic nations like Kyrgyz and Kazakh who are living in Asia, avoid determining a grave for people before they die. It might call as a taboo because they even avoid talking about someone's death. They believe that, this is a bad omen for the living. So if their ancestors carved the statues for the dead, then we should ask when those statues were carved: After death or while they are still alive. The article will try to seek an answer to the question posed above with the help of the statues part considered as a wife of Kul Tigin found in the ritual site.

An Alakul funeral and ritual site in the Eastern Orenburg region

An unusual funeral and ritual site of the Alakul culture is described. It is situated in the northern periphery of a Late Bronze Age mining and metallurgical center in the Ural–Mugodzhary region, and is associated with the Ishkinovka group of ancient copper mines, which began to be exploited in the Early Bronze Age. A stone statue and votive objects suggest that the kurgan was a sanctuary marking a tribal area and a ritual center of a population engaged in copper mining and copper metallurgy

Areni-1 Cave, Armenia: A Chalcolithic–Early Bronze Age settlement and ritual site in the southern Caucasus

The beginning of the Bronze Age in the southern Caucasus has been thought to coincide with the appearance of the Kura Araxes (KA) culture around 3500 cal b.c. KA artifacts are known not only from the southern Caucasus but also from sites in Anatolia, Iran, and the Levant. Recent discoveries from Areni-1 Cave in the Vayots Dzor region of Armenia demonstrate that the origin of the distinctive KA artifact assemblage lies in the Late Chalcolithic of the late 5th to early 4th millennia b.c. The cave contains rich assemblages of desiccated botanical remains that allow the site to be precisely dated and that demonstrate that its inhabitants exploited a wide variety of domesticated and wild plants. It would appear that from 4000 cal b.c. onwards, people used Areni-1 Cave for habitation and for keeping goats, storing plant foods, and ritual purposes; unusual for this time period are ceramic vessels containing the skulls of children.

Qaalluu, Smith and Metal: Traditional Conflict Resolution Mechanisms in the Medium of Metals among the Oromo of Northeast Wollega, Ethiopia

The introduction of metals, particularly iron, has always been seen as an important stage of socio-cultural, economic, and political departure of human development. Nevertheless, since its appearance in the form of utilitarian or armaments, iron has occupied an ambiguous position in any society. It has played both the role of production by increasing fertility or prosperity, and destruction by furnishing the process of or terminating life. This ambivalent position of the material is also evident in the position of the workers in their respective societies. Consequently, its workers (the tumtuu) are both feared and respected. This ambiguous position/role of the material and the artisans has long attracted heated debates amongst archaeometallurgists. Although the double roles of iron tools among the Oromo traditional believers in Wollega can never escape such debates, engagement in such a debate is beyond the scope of this article. This article, however, departs from the search for the destinations of iron tools once they left the production sites in the operational sequences i.e. traditional ritual site of the Qaalluu. The data for this discussion have emerged from my current ethnoarchaeometallurgical research in northeast Wollega, which aims to documenting different destination of iron/metal products after they left the cottage of the smiths. This article attempts to draw on the secular meaning of metal tools in order to attain the symbolic significance derived from it. Utilizing the data from traditional spiritual sites in northeast Wollega (Butaa Nadoo and Sagro Guddina), the article outlines the peaceful resolution of various forms of conflicts at the traditional ritual sites in the medium of metal tools or by invoking their symbolic value. Key words: Oromo, Wollega, Qalluu, Siida, Sibila Gurracha, conflict resolution

Overlapping nationalist projects and contested spaces: the Oromo–Somali borderlands in southern Ethiopia

Over the past few decades the inhabitants of the Oromo–Somali borderlands of southern Ethiopia have encountered three competing nationalisms: Ethiopian state nationalism (patriotism), Somali ethno-nationalism (irredentism), and Oromo ethno-nationalism. The territories and peoples claimed by each competing nationalism overlap. In the 1960s and 1970s Somali irredentist claims predominated, and generated a severe Ethiopian response. In the post-1991 period, claims and counter-claims over territories around the borders of the Oromia and Somali ethno-national regional states of Ethiopia became the centre of conflicts. These claims specifically contest water points, tracts of land, ritual sites and towns. The ethno-territorial contestation and negotiation between the Oromia and Somali ethno-national regional states are mirrored and explained at the local level by disputes and conflicts between the Borana and Garri pastoralists, who have reformulated their longstanding competitions over pastoral resources along the new political dispensation. This article examines the multifaceted interactions between state patriotism, ethno-nationalisms, irredentism and ethno-federalism in these borderlands from the 1960s to the present.

Images in bronze from the sarovka ritual complex: reconstructing semantics

The article reconstructs the semantics of imagery appearing in metalwork used in rituals performed by the Kulaika people in the 2nd–1st centuries BC at the Sarovka archaeological complex. The simultaneous and deliberate burial of objects at the ritual site makes it possible to view this collection of bronzes as a text. Here that text is compared with the mythological and folkloric texts of the Selkup people, who have been shown by Tomsk archaeologists to have their ancestors in the ancient Kulaika population. The heroes of Selkup mythology have much in common with fi gures depicted on Sarovka metalwork. They are consistently and systematically united by the fi gure of the celestial deity Kok. The ritual complex probably served as a place of worship to the ancient prototype of the Selkup god, whose veneration rituals were timed to celebrate the New Year. Evidently, rituals marking marriage between members of different clans were also at the site.

Metals from the ritual site of Shaitanskoye Ozero II (Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia)

The present article describes materials from the ritual site of Shaitanskoye Ozero II, Sverdlovsk Oblast. Few excavations carried out at the site measuring less than 240 sq. m in size, yielded more than 160 bronze artifacts: utensils, weapons, rolled copper ornaments, and abundant smelting and casting waste. Apart from Seima-Turbino (celts and laminar knives) and Eurasian types (daggers with cast hilts, truncated knives with guards, fluted bracelets and rings), several metal artifacts were revealed manufactured in the style of the Samus-Kizhirovo tradition. Bronze artifacts, stone knives and scrapers, and numerous arrowheads are accompanied by ceramics of the Koptyaki type. Metals use mainly a copper-tin alloy. This assemblage is shown to be relevant to the local tradition of metalworking, which, in this particular region, was comparatively ancient having been left uninterrupted by the rapid migrations of the Seima-Turbino people. In addition, the assemblage indicates the sources from which post-Seima artifacts reached the Alakul people. These artifacts may also have been linked with a large metalworking center located in the Middle Urals.