“The Place of Solemne Prayer”: Intrasettlement Post-and-Trench Mortuary-Ritual Structures in the Precontact Era of Northern Ohio

ABSTRACT

Most traditional archaeological interpretations of life within late precontact period village sites in the Eastern Woodlands focus primarily on the domestic sphere or ritual activities associated solely with burial features. Yet, ethnohistorical studies reveal that both the domestic and ritual-ceremonial realms were tightly entangled in the lives of indigenous actors during the contact period. A recent reanalysis of a small enclosure and burial precinct at the White Fort site in northern Ohio presents new evidence of ceremonial use and reuse within a large habitation site during the late precontact period (ca. AD 1250–1400). Excavation data reveal how human interment, artifact caching, and layering of colored soils were incorporated in six pit burials arranged around a C-shaped post-and-ditch enclosure. The sequencing of interments and enclosure construction that composed this distinct area show that it served as a hub for burial and ritual behavior over multiple generations of seasonal village occupation.     

From the Ground Up: Agency,Practice, and Community in the Southwestern British Bronze Age

Embodied, sensual, engagements between people, earthly elements, and celestial bodies during focused, periodic acts of ritual construction and artifact deposition in the southwestern British Bronze Age resulted in the remaking of identities, local communities, symbolic/mythical knowledge, and the landscape itself. To appreciate how material culture, time, and space were employed to define the criteria by which people understood themselves and their world necessitates an archaeological focus upon shared practices in particular settings that served to define rules of engagement with the environment based upon shared human perceptions. Agency appears in this encounter as central in the construction and perpetuation of symbolic perception, shared social memory, and community identity.     

The Spring Festival of Akaška / Nunal Celebrated by the Southern Udmurts in the Late 19TH–EARLY 20TH Century

The article describes the traditional spring festival of Aka?ka celebrated by the Southern Udmurts. The content and form of the festival indicate that some elements were borrowed from the Turkic world. While some borrowed elements have their counterparts in the ritual practices of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Middle Volga region and the Urals, the sources of other borrowed elements can be found in the Turko-Mongolian environment of southern Siberia and the Altai.     

宣化辽墓壁画散乐图与备茶图的礼仪功能

本文从世俗艺术与宗教艺术的礼仪功能角度,讨论了宣化辽墓壁画散乐图和备茶图两种题材在墓葬当中的关系及其意义。这一讨论大体确认:与同时期的许多宋金墓葬装饰相类似,宣化辽墓壁画散乐图和备茶图以及它们在墓葬中的结构,与民间祠庙中的赛神供盏仪式有密切关系,两种题材共同组成了墓葬中娱悦和祭供死者的礼仪性虚拟空间。进而推断:当时的散乐与饮茶文化,已经以一种“礼”的方式进入了辽代普通富庶汉人的墓葬,成为死者来世享乐生活的永久象征。     

周公摄政与周初政教关系初探

周公摄政导致了周初二王并存的局面,而二王并存的实质是国家政权和教权的分离。周公是周代初期的巫史领袖,并于武王后期开始执掌教权,由于不能和政权明确分开,引起王族的猜疑。周公为此迁居东都洛邑,并致力于制礼作乐,目的是使政教分权更加明晰化,造成了一次意义深远的社会制度和思想化的革命。     

作册般铜鼋所记史事的性质

作册般铜鼋是一件珍贵的商代末期青铜器。其铭文所记史事和器物造型所展现的史实是射礼,如果把它与田猎挂钩,则有许多疑窦;如果把它与射礼相联系,则颇能印证文献和西周金文的有关记载。可以说西周辟雍大池的水上射礼很有可能渊源于商代晚期的洹水水上射礼。周礼“三番射”中的某些仪节和必射四矢之寓意,在商代晚期就已经存在。射鱼也是当时常见的一种射礼,射鼋则是射鱼的一项重要射礼内容。本文还对鼋铭作了考释,并认定该器是铭功的庸器、再现商王射艺的实物模型。铜鼋的铭文与造型构思所反映的史事是商代末期王在洹水进行的一次水上射礼活动。     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

A post-contact Aboriginal mortuary tree from southwestern Victoria,Australia

Abstract

Here we document the investigation of the first Australian Aboriginal mortuary tree found since the early 20th century and the first studied by archaeologists and Aboriginal traditional owners. In 2001, a landowner discovered Aboriginal skeletal remains inside a fallen, dead tree while evaluating the tree’s potential as firewood, leading to the investigation of the site. The tree was located near Moyston, in southwestern Victoria, in traditional Djab Wurrung country and held the partial skeletons of three Aboriginal individuals—two adults and a child. Clay pipe-stem wear on several teeth belonging to the two adults indicates that these remains were broadly contemporaneous secondary placements from the early post-contact period (ca. a.d. 1835–1845). Along with five additional mortuary trees within 30 km of the Moyston tree, this practice constitutes a previously unknown traditional mortuary pattern and contributes to our understanding of the complex mortuary behavior of the Aboriginal people of southwestern Victoria.