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CHAPTER 8 ARCHAIC RITUALS AT SHELL-BEARING SITES Archaic rituals and beliefs are the frontier in the study of the past in North America.Woodland period ritual beliefs have been tackled in two recent compendia (Charles and Buikstra 2006, Carr and Case 2005) and Mississippian beliefs continue to attract scholarly attention (e.g., Reilly and Garber 2007). Webb (1950a), Winters (1969), and Blitz (1983) offered thoughts on Archaic beliefs and ritual paraphernalia. Numerous people have discussed the cache blade phenomenon as well (e.g., Deter-Wolf 2004, Futato 1983, Johnson and Brookes 1989, Sassaman et al. 1988). Burial ceremonialism has been explored by Mires (1991) and Bader (2006), among others. Understanding caves as ritual places has been the focus of work in the past decade (Claassen 2006a, 2006b, Lockheart et al. 2007, Simek et al. 2007). The shells, the burials, the dogs, the caches, and the artifacts found in the shell-bearing sites of the southern Ohio Valley leave us tantalizing clues as to the types of rituals enacted in these settings and the beliefs that motivated them. In the previous chapter, I proposed a set of sacred sites for each district of the southern Ohio Valley, including bluff-top shell sites, riverside shell-heap mortuaries, shell-free mortuaries, and natural features, particularly caves. The bluff-top sites in the Green River district were scenes of numerous dog ceremonies and were possible burial processing locations. The large shell heaps found there and elsewhere were places for staging rituals important to groups of people and holding feasts of regional scope. In addition to feeding an audience, making a show of Other World favoritism, and communicating social information to attendees, feasts are the primary means used to mobilize labor (R. Saunders 2004). Labor would have been needed in the production of the feasts but also in the maintenance and “feeding” of shrines, idols, fires, and other ritual 170 Archaic Rituals at Shell-bearing Sites facilities and utensils (e.g., Brown 2005). What rituals may have been held that would have precipitated the great and small feasts indicated by shell accumulation? Based on the evidence available from excavation reports, it is possible to propose that one key ritual observed was earth renewal where priests addressed the moon, sun, thunder, lightning, rain deities, and ancestors to petition them for fertility of women, families, game, and plants. These renewal rites involved bone caching, shell accumulation, human sacrifice, and stone deposits.Another important ritual may have been a community rebalancing rite, the most severe of which involved a distinctive type of burial. There is also a hint of going-to-water rites, which may have focused on either a river-keeper sodality and/or cleansing mourners of corpse sickness. It is these rites that I will focus on in this chapter. In addition, I will present evidence of the symbolic importance of shell and stone. In addition to the public rites at the shell-bearing sites, there would also be rites conducted by individuals held at natural features and the private mortuaries making requests for aid and thanksgiving for aid in courting, hunting, fishing, trading, dreaming, fiber arts, lapidary arts and other such skilled endeavors, traveling, alliance making, and seeking lost items and people. Those prayers would be delivered by aromas, sounds, animal others, spirits, and deities. Individuals performing birthing rites, naming rites, first craft production/kill rites, completion or achievement rites in craft production or hunting, or fishing (e.g., Schaefer 2002) are to be anticipated as well, each with aspects of fertility, health, and thanksgiving. Curing and well-being rites with protection from witches, malevolent spirits/airs, and powerful priests would be important. The material manifestations of these ritual actions and prayers that are apparent in the North American ethnographies, and in the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian sacred sites and ritual deposits, are tool, craft, and animal part offerings, human and animal sacrifice, ocher, cremation, rite paraphernalia (e.g., pipes, beads, shells, rattles, stones), and indications of directionality and numeracy. But there were many more elements that were perishable,or intangible: gender; water; smoke; smells, sounds, color; time; solar, astral, and lunar alignments; feasting and fasting. Because the various rites and their elements are so intertwined in meaning and staging, and because analogy and metaphor are essential elements of native perception (Hall 1997), my discussion of artifacts, features, postures, associations, context, and meaning will be hopelessly reductive. A rich world of pageantry, prescription, dancing, singing, feasting, learning, emotion, and drama will be reduced to...

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