Author: A. Martin Byers Publisher: ISBN: 9780813045597 Category : Earthworks (Archaeology) Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
This collection of essays addresses important questions, like these and others, by examining the cultural and social nature of the well-known Ohio Hopewell monumental earthworks. Scholars discuss the purpose, meaning, and role of earthworks and other artifacts, theorizing on how they may have reflected political, social, and practical ecological organization.
Author: A. Martin Byers Publisher: ISBN: 9780813080598 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This volume address important questions about the ancient societies of the Middle Ohio Valley by examining the cultural and social nature of the Ohio Hopewell monumental earthworks.
Author: Lucianne Lavin Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 0816550883 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 458
Book Description
Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites. This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation. In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection. This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites. Contributors Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling Robert DeFosses James Gage Mary Gage Doug Harris Julia A. King Lucianne Lavin Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser Frederick W. Martin Norman Muller Charity Moore Norton Paul A. Robinson Laurie W. Rush Scott M. Strickland Elaine Thomas Kathleen Patricia Thrane Matthew Victor Weiss
Author: Mark Lynott Publisher: Oxbow Books ISBN: 1782977546 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
Nearly 2000 years ago, people living in the river valleys of southern Ohio built earthen monuments on a scale that is unmatched in the archaeological record for small-scale societies. The period from c. 200 BC to c. AD 500 (Early to Middle Woodland) witnessed the construction of mounds, earthen walls, ditches, borrow pits and other earthen and stone features covering dozen of hectares at many sites and hundreds of hectares at some. The development of the vast Hopewell Culture geometric earthwork complexes such as those at Mound City, Chilicothe; Hopewell; and the Newark earthworks was accompanied by the establishment of wide-ranging cultural contacts reflected in the movement of exotic and strikingly beautiful artefacts such as elaborate tobacco pipes, obsidian and chert arrowheads, copper axes and regalia, animal figurines and delicately carved sheets of mica. These phenomena, coupled with complex burial rituals, indicate the emergence of a political economy based on a powerful ideology of individual power and prestige, and the creation of a vast cultural landscape within which the monument complexes were central to a ritual cycle encompassing a substantial geographical area. The labour needed to build these vast cultural landscapes exceeds population estimates for the region, and suggests that people from near (and possibly far) travelled to the Scioto and other river valleys to help with construction of these monumental earthen complexes. Here, Mark Lynott draws on more than a decade of research and extensive new datasets to re-examine the spectacular and massive scale Ohio Hopewell landscapes and to explore the society that created them.
Author: Lindsay Jones Publisher: University of Virginia Press ISBN: 0813937795 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Considered a wonder of the ancient world, the Newark Earthworks—the gigantic geometrical mounds of earth built nearly two thousand years ago in the Ohio valley--have been a focal point for archaeologists and surveyors, researchers and scholars for almost two centuries. In their prime one of the premier pilgrimage destinations in North America, these monuments are believed to have been ceremonial centers used by ancestors of Native Americans, called the "Hopewell culture," as social gathering places, religious shrines, pilgrimage sites, and astronomical observatories. Yet much of this territory has been destroyed by the city of Newark, and the site currently "hosts" a private golf course, making it largely inaccessible to the public. The first book-length volume devoted to the site, The Newark Earthworks reveals the magnitude and the geometric precision of what remains of the earthworks and the site’s undeniable importance to our history. Including contributions from archaeologists, historians, cultural geographers, and cartographers, as well as scholars in religious studies, legal studies, indigenous studies, and preservation studies, the book follows an interdisciplinary approach to shine light on the Newark Earthworks and argues compellingly for its designation as a World Heritage Site.
Author: A. Martin Byers Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806153776 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 441
Book Description
Multiple Hopewellian monumental earthwork sites displaying timber features, mortuary deposits, and unique artifacts are found widely distributed across the North American Eastern Woodlands, from the lower Mississippi Valley north to the Great Lakes. These sites, dating from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500, almost define the Middle Woodland period of the Eastern Woodlands. Joseph Caldwell treated these sites as defining what he termed the “Hopewell Interaction Sphere,” which he conceptualized as mediating a set of interacting mortuary-funerary cults linking many different local ethnic communities. In this new book, A. Martin Byers refines Caldwell’s work, coining the term “Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere” to more precisely characterize this transregional sphere as manifesting multiple autonomous cult sodalities of local communities affiliated into escalating levels of autonomous cult sodality heterarchies. It is these cult sodality heterarchies, regionally and transregionally interacting—and not their autonomous communities to which the sodalities also belonged—that were responsible for the Hopewellian assemblage; and the heterarchies took themselves to be performing, not funerary, but world-renewal ritual ceremonialism mediated by the deceased of their many autonomous Middle Woodland communities. Paired with the cult sodality heterarchy model, Byers proposes and develops the complementary heterarchical community model. This model postulates a type of community that made the formation of the cult sodality heterarchy possible. But Byers insists it was the sodality heterarchies and not the complementary heterarchical communities that generated the Hopewellian ceremonial sphere. Detailed interpretations and explanations of Hopewellian sites and their contents in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia empirically anchor his claims. A singular work of unprecedented scope, Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere will encourage archaeologists to re-examine their interpretations.
Author: Alice P. Wright Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813065283 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
Fourteen in-depth case studies incorporate empirical data with theoretical concepts such as ritual, aggregation, and place-making, highlighting the variability and common themes in the relationships between people, landscapes, and the built environment that characterize this period of North American native life in the Southeast.
Author: Marilyn Lee Publisher: Barbara Anderson ISBN: 146635111X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 606
Book Description
A highly evolved civilization, almost unknown to history, thrived in North America for centuries long before the coming of Europeans.The Camp of God's Tears is a tragic tale about this civilization as it ended. This story is grounded in fact according to archeological, genetic, and linguistic data as reflected in the Afterward which presents supportive information and a bibliography of nearly 400 sources. This saga is told as a narrative by Gray Wolf who begins his story during his late adolescence and follows through six generations until he becomes a great-grandfather.The Camp of God's Tears reveals the high level of sophistication of this culture which was far more advanced than many cultures of the same time period, circa 300 AD. More importantly, it articulates the depth of their spirituality and moral codes by which these people lived. While the mysterious ending of a great culture is heart-rendering, the story ends on a note of hope for contemporary times. The story came to me in a dream. It was told to me by Falling Star. She answered a myriad of questions I asked. She showed me the locations of where the events in the story took place. She showed me her People who wore exotic clothes made of finely woven textiles decorated with pearls, copper and other artistic ornaments. She showed me strongly built homes, their villages, and their expansive farms. I saw their social organization was powerful yet simple, a few shaman, elders, and no real leaders. She intrigued me with their immense earthworks which demonstrate accurate astronomical alignments to the Sun, Moon, stars, and galaxies. The organization of labor, engineering skills, mathematical and astronomical knowledge required to build these phenomenal earthworks amazes modern researchers. I asked Falling Star why she showed me all of this. She said her People wanted their story told and asked me if I would tell it. Of course, I said, and then I asked her why. She said her People were so deeply spiritual, so in tune and in touch with the Creator that they actively lived the principles of Oneness. Their ways demonstrated what being one and at one with the One . . . looked like in real life. She said the people of my time need to know these principles and to learn to live them, because humankind is struggling to regain balance in a troubled world.
Author: Hung Wu Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0873658647 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Res 61/62 includes “Chinese coffins from the first millennium b.c. and early images of the afterworld” by Alain Thote; “Art and personhood” by Björn Ewald; “Western Han sarcophagi and the transformation of Chinese funerary art” by Zheng Yan; “Reading identity on Roman strigillated sarcophagi” by Janet Huskinson; and other papers.
Author: Benjamin Alberti Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315434237 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 469
Book Description
A new generation of archaeologists has thrown down a challenge to post-processual theory, arguing that characterizing material symbols as arbitrary overlooks the material character and significance of artifacts. This volume showcases the significant departure from previous symbolic approaches that is underway in the discipline. It brings together key scholars advancing a variety of cutting edge approaches, each emphasizing an understanding of artifacts and materials not in terms of symbols but relationally, as a set of associations that compose people’s understanding of the world. Authors draw on a diversity of intellectual sources and case studies, paving a dynamic road ahead for archaeology as a discipline and theoretical approaches to material culture.
Author: A. Martin Byers
Author: A. Martin Byers
Author: Lucianne Lavin
Author: Mark Lynott
Author: Lindsay Jones
Author: A. Martin Byers
Author: Alice P. Wright
Author: Marilyn Lee
Author: Hung Wu
Author: Benjamin Alberti