Myths, Religion, Cult, and Magic
Ancient Mesoamerica Worldview
The populations of ancient Mesoamerica shared many cultural traits, including a complex belief about sacred geography and worldview.
Archaeology of Death: Encounter with a Dowser
It was a wickedly cold day, the day I stood next to the landowner, a short, blunt woman in her 60s, and her tall narrow son, a physicist at the university, and watched the dowser at work.
Atlantis
Atlantis is a fictional kingdom described by Plato in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias.
Cannibalism
One of the early and rare practices of human beings, cannibalism involves a range of behaviors in which one human consumes another or parts of another, for dietary or ritual purposes.
Cardiff Giant (USA)
The Cardiff Giant was a famous nineteenth century hoax, which paid off handsomely to its perpetrators.
Daoism - Taoism
Daoism is a belief system that arose in China during the Han dynasty, developing from the primitive shamanism of the Ba culture into a formal Daoist religion during the second century BC.
Oracle Bones
Oracle bones are a type of artifact found in archaeological sites from the Shang Dynasty in China.
Moundbuilder Myth
The lost race or moundbuilder myth is one created by incoming European settlers of the North American continent who could not, or did not want to, believe that the mounds had been built by the Native American peoples they were displacing.
Religion in Archaeology
The study of religion in archaeology is not an easy matter, and not just in a political sense of the word.
TechnoPagans
An alternative megalithic site, exploring the Celtic religious and artistic elements of henges and related sites, what webmaven Cerridwen Connelly calls a Book of Shadows.
Pseudo-Archaeology
Pseudo-archaeology is one of the burdens the romance of archaeology has dealt the profession.
Shamanism
Shamanism is the term given by anthropologists to the most basic and universal form of religion: the ritual specialist or shaman.
Temples and Shrines
Basically, archaeologists think of the word temple as meaning one of three kinds of shrines.
The Gottschall Rockshelter
Gottschall Rockshelter, a cave located in the upper Mississippi River watershed of southwestern Wisconsin, was a religious shrine to an ancestor cult, used in this manner beginning about 300 AD up until the early 19th century.
Zemis of the Taino Culture
Zemis are a type of religious object, a representation of a deity in wood, stone, shell or other material that were used by the Caribbean Taino people.
Çatalhöyük: Urban Life in Neolithic Anatolia
On the yellow plains of central Anatolia lie the remains of one of the oldest civilizations on earth. Called Çatalhöyük, the site was occupied from about 6300-5500 bc, and its most striking and famous feature are the shrines, shrines dedicated to what has been called the "Mother Goddess."