From Discard to Divination: Demarcating the Sacred Through the Collection and Curation of Discarded Objects

Abstract

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Pilgrimage as costly signal: Religiously motivated cooperation in Chaco and Nasca

“…65-66, Webb, 2000. Although such tokens need not be manufactured (e.g., Brown, 2000), the need for such symbols as testaments of pilgrimage could contribute to a craft economy at the center, with greater levels of specialization and the use of rare materials emerging as a way to discourage ''knock-offs''; it is easy to imagine something of a ''Red Queen's race'' developing between bona fide symbols of pilgrimage and fakes, leading to the use of rarer materials and greater labor investments to distinguish the former from the latter. And the accumulation of tokens by pilgrims, both as demonstration of adherence and as a form of social mobility (e.g., Rogers, 2003), could further promote their materialization.…”

New World States and Empires: Politics, Religion, and Urbanism

“…Ceramic figurines, long relegated to typological, stylistic, and chronological analyses, have emerged as important components in social analyses of domestic rituals (Cyphers Guillén, 1993;Lesure, 1999Lesure, , 2002Marcus, 1996Marcus, , 1998b. Studies of other ritual artifacts (such as censers), domestic burials, and shrines also are contributing to a growing understanding of the nature of ritual practices in the domestic realm (Brown, 2000;Masson, 1999b;McAnany, 1995;McAnany et al, 1999;Plunket and Uruñuela, 1998;Rice, 1999). Plunket's (2002) recent collection, Domestic Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica, marks a culmination of this line of analysis and sets the groundwork for more detailed investigations of household-level ritual in the future.…”

New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization

“…The site of Cerén in El Salvador has long been held up as the closest New World analog to Pompeii as a site quickly buried by volcanic ash (Sheets, 1992), and useful studies of household remains from this site continue to appear (Brown, 2000;Kievit, 1994;Sheets, 2002). Tetimpa in Puebla is another site where volcanic deposition has produced well-preserved remains (Panfil et al, 1998;Plunket and Uruñuela, 1998).…”