The influence of religious authority in everyday life: a landscape-scale study of domestic architecture and religious law in ancient Hawai’i

Abstract

Public architecture has proven its utility as a metric for the materialization of religious authority; however, archaeologists have been less successful at identifying how ideology is materialized outside formal ritual settings. Here we address the question of how religious laws that dictated separation of people and activities -known as the kapu system -influenced the way homes were built in pre-European contact era Hawai'i. On the landscape scale, we consider three variables that could be correlated with the influence of religious authority: distance to a local temple marking a district boundary, the degree of daily interaction within the community and investment in household architecture. Our findings suggest religious authority was materialized with a high degree of ubiquity across all house sites without regard to any of these factors, a pattern consistent with pervasive religious authority across daily life. ARTICLE HISTORY

A Standard for the Scholarly Citation of Archaeological Data as an Incentive to Data Sharing

“…According to the Crossref data, citation of archaeological data in repositories is a recent phenomenon, with the majority in our sample occurring over the last 12 months. We found only one example of a dataset DOI cited in a journal article (McCoy and Codlin 2016). This may be an underestimate, given Huggett's (2017) finding that 56 of 476 archaeology data sources in the Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index have citations in Web of Science databases.…”

Geographical approaches to religion in the past

“…Nevertheless, there is a growing body of geographical researcher into the intersections between religion and built environments not specifically constructed for religious purposes (McCoy & Codlin, 2016;Shubin & Harper, 2022). For example, Abigail Gomulkiewicz (2020) used small household items to explore the spread of Protestant ideas during the Reformation and positioned theological change within the everyday context of individuals' homes.…”

“…However, material religion has almost exclusively informed geographical explorations of purpose‐built religious spaces and has therefore continued to perpetuate the modern and western emphasis on institutionalised religion. Nevertheless, there is a growing body of geographical researcher into the intersections between religion and built environments not specifically constructed for religious purposes (McCoy & Codlin, 2016; Shubin & Harper, 2022). For example, Abigail Gomulkiewicz (2020) used small household items to explore the spread of Protestant ideas during the Reformation and positioned theological change within the everyday context of individuals' homes.…”