Myths, Religion, Cult, and Magic

The populations of ancient Mesoamerica shared many cultural traits, including a complex belief about sacred geography and worldview.

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 is a fictional kingdom described by Plato in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias.

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.

The Cardiff Giant was a famous nineteenth century hoax, which paid off handsomely to its perpetrators.

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.

The archaeology and history of this ancient city of David reflects its present problems.

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.

Oracle bones are a type of artifact found in archaeological sites from the Shang Dynasty in China.

The perpetrators of the infamous Piltdown hoax of the early 20th century have never been satisfactorily identified.

Pseudo-archaeology is one of the burdens the romance of archaeology has dealt the profession.

The study of religion in archaeology is not an easy matter, and not just in a political sense of the word.

Shamanism is the term given by anthropologists to the most basic and universal form of religion: the ritual specialist or shaman.

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.

Basically, archaeologists think of the word temple as meaning one of three kinds of shrines.

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.

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.

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."