Mary Carolyn Beaudry

Cheryl Claassen

Selected Papers from the 1991 Boone Conference

Exploring Gender Through Archaeology

Laura Ammon

Detailed comparison of Aztec and Spanish religious devotion, examining the melding of practices during the first century of contact 1519-1600.

A Guide to Aztec and Catholic Beliefs and Practices

Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Michael Trinkley

Debi Hacker

The site is on the southeastern tip of James Island off of Fort Lamar Road, and includes both a prehistoric shellfish steaming pit and Confederate fortifications.

Excavations at a Portion of the Secessionville Archaeological Site (38CH1456), James Island, Charleston County, South Carolina

A Shell Matrix Site in the Lower Hudson Valley

Dogan Point

A comprehensive and essential field reference, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America reveals the spiritual landscape in the American Archaic period. Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America describes, illustrates, and offers nondogmatic interpretations of rituals and beliefs in Archaic America. In compiling a wealth of detailed entries, author Cheryl Claassen has created both an exhaustive reference as well as an opening into new archaeological taxonomies, connections, and understandings of Native American culture. The material is presented in an introductory essay about Archaic rituals followed by two sections of entries that incorporate reports and articles discussing archaeological sites; studies of relevant practices of ritual and belief; data related to geologic features, artifact attributes, and burial settings; ethnographies; and pilgrimages to specific sites. Claassen’s work focuses on the American Archaic period (marked by the end of the Ice Age approximately 11,000 years ago) and a geographic area bounded by the edge of the Great Plains, Newfoundland, and southern Florida. This period and region share specific beliefs and practices such as human sacrifice, dirt mound burial, and oyster shell middens. This interpretive guide serves as a platform for new interpretations and theories on this period. For example, Claassen connects rituals to topographic features and posits the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as a major stimulus to Archaic beliefs. She also expands the interpretation of existing data previously understood in economic or environmental terms to include how this same data may also reveal spiritual and symbolic practices. Similarly, Claassen interprets Archaic culture in terms of human agency and social constraint, bringing ritual acts into focus as drivers of social transformation and ethnogenesis. Richly annotated and cross-referenced for ease of use, Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America will benefit scholars and students of archaeology and Native American culture. Claassen’s overview of the archaeological record should encourage the development of original archaeological and historical connections and patterns. Such an approach, Claassen suggests, may reveal patterns of influence extending from early eastern Americans to the Aztec and Maya.

An Interpretive Guide

Beliefs and Rituals in Archaic Eastern North America

Cheryl Claassen offers an authoritative, readable and clear guide to the study of shells, which is addressed to students and professional archaeologists and palaeontologists. She considers the history of archaeological interest in shells, the biology of freshwater and marine molluscs, and critically discusses current techniques, methods, and research problems. Drawing on examples worldwide, and covering prehistoric and historic periods, among the topics covered are: is shell deposit natural or cultural? How long do shells last? What can shells tell us about the environmental characteristics and ancient habitats or about the people who collected them? What symbolic roles have shells served in human societies? This is a well balanced account, and all aspects of the subject are clearly represented.

Shells

Rosemary A. Joyce

During the 1960s, scholars constructed a model of cultural evolution in which men cooperated in the hunting of big game while women gathered plant food, "immobilized" by pregnancy and childcare. The essays in Women in Prehistory challenge this model as they reconsider women's social and economic roles.

Cheryl Claassen

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