Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas

Sarah Barber, Arthur A. Joyce, Sarah Barber, Arthur A. Joyce, Sarah B. Barber, Arthur A. Joyce

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138907898
• eBook ISBN: 9781317440826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas spans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America.

Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas considers the ways in which religion itself generated political innovation and thus enabled political centralization to occur. It moves beyond a "Great Tradition" focus on elite religion to understand how local political authority was negotiated, contested, bolstered, and undermined within diverse constituencies, demonstrating how religion has transformed non-Western societies. As well as offering readers fresh perspectives on specific archaeological cases, this book breaks new ground in the archaeological examination of religion and society.

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New directions in the archaeology of religion and politics in the Americas

Arthur A. Joyce

Introduction

Although religion has been a topic of interest in American archaeology since the beginnings of the discipline in the nineteenth century, it has typically been considered methodologically challenging and of secondary importance to economic factors in understanding the history of precolumbian peoples. Since the 1970s, however, archaeologists have increasingly considered how religion was important in facilitating political integration and legitimizing authority in ancient societies. Less often, religion has been considered a primary factor in major political transformations. In addition, archaeological research has traditionally focused on religion as practiced by social elites. Only recently have archaeologists begun to investigate the religious beliefs and practices of non-elites and begun to see religion as a social field through which power was negotiated and sometimes contested. One reason for downplaying the role of religion in political affairs is the common view that religion is difficult or impossible to access archaeologically. As discussed by Fogelin (2007), archaeologists have tended to view religion as underlying beliefs and ideas that motivated ritual practice. Religious belief was seen as inaccessible, while ritual action could be addressed archaeologically.

The contributors to this volume seek to develop a more nuanced approach to religion and politics in the ancient Americas through consideration of three interrelated themes:

1. 1 To move beyond a focus on political integration by considering how religion was involved in the creation, negotiation, and contestation of political authority. This theme seeks to challenge the view of religion as epiphenomenal to political change. Authors in the volume reinterpret political change in precolumbian complex societies by explicitly considering how religious practice, paraphernalia, and belief facilitated and constrained transformations in political authority and organization. Authors also move beyond the “Great Tradition” of elite religion to understand the ways that political authority in complex societies was negotiated, contested, bolstered, and undermined among diverse constituencies via religious idioms.
2. 2 To consider the recent ontological turn in archaeology (e.g., Zedeño 2009) and how an understanding of Native American ontologies informs our view of precolumbian religion and its relationship to politics. Since most Native American ontologies are relational, they also challenge the Cartesian dualisms in which Western scholarship is embedded, including the binary of religious belief and ritual practice that has been central to archaeological approaches to religion.
3. 3 To consider recent theories of materiality (e.g., Latour 2005; Miller 2005) and how these can provide new insights into the entities – simultaneously social, material, and spiritual – that made a difference in political life. By considering the involvement of religious practices, materials, and beliefs in the entanglements through which political formations were constituted, the authors provide a more comprehensive view of the relationship between religion and politics in precolumbian America.

This chapter provides an overview of each of the themes that organize the volume beginning with a brief history of research on the relationship between religion and politics in American archaeology as background. As discussed in the final section of this chapter, each of the contributions to the volume addresses at least one of these themes. The authors also consider the themes from a diversity of perspectives, which provides for a more thoughtful approach to the problem of religion and politics.

A brief history of research on religion and politics in American archaeology

In American archaeology, religion has been a topic of research since the beginnings of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Through much of the history of the discipline, religion was viewed as unimportant to social change. Until the 1960s, religion was viewed as difficult to address archaeologically as exemplified by Hawkes’ ladder of inference. The majority of research involved typologies of religious art, architecture, and artifacts as well as descriptions of discoveries such as tombs and temples. General syntheses that addressed ancient religion typically relied on ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence and assumptions of continuity with the pre-contact past to interpret archaeological data and construct narratives on religious life in the ancient Americas (Rowe 1948; Tello 1929, 1942; Thompson 1954; Vaillant 1941; Waring and Holder 1945). The most significant work on religion during this period dealt with Maya writing, especially the prehispanic calendar as well as the identification of deities on inscriptions and iconography (Morley 1920, 1932–1938; Thompson 1929). Based on the epigraphic work, many archaeologists believed that ancient Maya society was integrated through religious ideologies focused on ceremonial centers and theocratic rulers (Thompson 1942; Willey 1956). Research on prehispanic religion was also almost entirely focused on elites at this time.

With the advent and optimism of the New Archaeology in the 1960s, religion was seen as potentially accessible due to its systemic connections to archaeologically visible dimensions of culture (Binford 1962; Fritz 1978). Until the 1980s, however, research on the relationship between religion and politics lagged behind studies of economy and ecology. Exceptions to this generalization include Drennan’s (1976, 1983) model, drawing on Rappaport (1968), of the role of religion in the origins of social complexity. Drennan argued for the importance of religious rituals of sanctification as a means through which the decisions of emerging administrative institutions were accepted (also see Flannery 1968). Drawing from both structuralism and ecological systems theory, Isbell (1978) argued that Andean cosmology provided a highly stable reservoir for information of adaptive significance. Another important study, although not linked explicitly to political concerns, was Flannery’s and Marcus’s (1976; Flannery 1976) examination of religious artifacts from low-status houses in the Formative-period Valley of Oaxaca. Research on “commoner ritual” would not become a major focus until the 2000s (see below).

Research on religion and politics in American archaeology increased greatly during the 1980s and 1990s. Many studies of religion and politics were based on the neoevolutionary and ecological functionalism that had dominated American archaeology since the 1960s, and tended to focus on the role of ritual and religion in the integration of sociocultural systems (Lipe and Hegmon 1989; Morris 1998; Morris and Thompson 1985). New approaches also emerged at this time; many inspired by considerations of postprocessual and Marxist theory (Ashmore 1991; Conrad and Demarest 1984; Janusek 2006; Jennings 2003; Joyce and Winter 1996; McGuire and Saitta 1996; Moore 1996; Pauketat and Emerson 1991; Potter 2000). Much of this research focused on how religion and ritual operated as a form of ideology through which political authority and elite interests in complex societies were realized and legitimated. In Mesoamerican archaeology, an even more important factor in the linkage of religion to politics was the revolution in the decipherment of Maya writing, which in conjunction with iconographic, ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and archaeological data led to the recognition that religion figured prominently as a basis of rulership (Freidel and Schele 1988; Houston 1993; Stuart 1984).

Stemming from both the focus on integration and legitimation as well as the prevalence of data speaking to the religious practices of the elite, archaeological research has tended to focus on forms of high culture dominated by elites and their interests. Studies of the religious life of common people in both complex and small-scale societies has only become an important topic of research in the past 20 years (Aldenderfer 1993; Cutright 2013; Emerson 1997; Gonlin and Lohse 2007; Janusek 2009; Plunket 2002). Despite this focus, few scholars have considered the possibility that religion could impede social change or that the religious practices of non-elites, local leaders, and lesser nobility could influence political history (Hutson et al., Chapter 8; Janusek 2005; Joyce et al. 2001; R. Joyce, Chapter 7; Lohse 2007; Wilson 2008; Yaeger 2003). More recently, archaeologists have begun to consider religion as a social field through which power and political authority were negotiated and sometimes contested (Barber and Joyce 2007; Dillehay 2004; Janusek 2004; A. Joyce 2010; Pauketat and Alt 2003; Swenson 2007).

At an even more basic level, American archaeologists have increasingly questioned perspectives rooted in Western Cartesian dualisms for addressing the religion of people who often held radically different ontological positions (Mock 1998; Swenson 2015; Zedeño 2008). Studies of ancient religion are also increasingly drawing on materiality theories that are likewise based on relational perspectives (Joyce and Barber 2015; Pauketat 2013; Walker 2008). These developments in approaches to religion and politics serve as a jumping off point for this volume.

Beyond integration

Archaeologists are now beginning to recognize that not only elites, but commoners as well, had rich religious lives that included rituals carried out at the individual, household, barrio, and community level. Although commoners participated in ceremonies led by rulers and elite ritual specialists, they also contacted the divine through practices that were independent of the “Great Traditions” of elite religion (e.g., Brown 2000; Brumfiel 2011; Cutright 2013; Emerson 1997; Robin 2002; Zaro and Lohse 2005), and religious specialists were not restricted to social elites (e.g., Brown et al. 2002). In many instances, elite-dominated religious institutions at the level of the polity likely developed from established practices at the local, non-elite level (Lucero 2006; McAnany 1995). Furthermore, Blackmore (2011) reminds us that commoners are not homogenous and that religious practice is one way in which households in non-elite neighborhoods were differentiated (also see Gonlin 2007; Hutson et al., Chapter 8).

Even at the level of large-scale, public ritual led by elites in complex societies, comparative research indicates that rather than acting as a means for communicating broadly understood ideological notions, religious practice and symbolism can often carry a high level of ambiguity (Bell 1992, 1997). This ambiguity affords a variety of interpretations, which on the one hand can be important in unifying diverse groups in complex societies, but on the other can be sites of struggle and contestation (Kertzer 1988). Ritualized practices are effective means of promoting solidarity because they rarely promote an explicit interpretation and instead focus more on common symbols that leave considerable room for negotiated appropriations of meaning (Bell 1992:182–187; Fernandez 1965). Religious ritual therefore is not a heavy-handed form of social control. Conversely, like ideology, ritualized acts, according to Bell (1992:195), construct an argument, creating a set of tensions and potential struggle surrounding negotiated appropriations of the beliefs and values embedded in religious symbolism and practice (also see R. Joyce, Chapter 7). Ritualized practices are therefore not simply a means through which power is legitimated, but is the very production, negotiation, appropriation, and contestation of power. Archaeological studies that have explored the political implications of the polysemy of religious objects include Van Keuren’s (2011) study of ceremonial plazas and the iconography of red-slipped polychrome bowls in the late-prehispanic Southwest, and Urcid’s and Joyce’s (2014) examination of Late Formative period monumental art and architecture at Monte Albán.

The recognition of the plurality of religious belief and practice, along with their political and ideological implications, has opened the door for viewing religion as a site of struggle, contestation, and negotiation among differentially positioned actors and collectivities (Brumfiel 1996; Carballo 2007; Cutright 2013; Houston et al. 2003; Janusek 2004; Joyce et al. 2001; R. Joyce, Chapter 7; Pauketat and Alt 2003; Piscitelli, Chapter 9). Few studies, however, have explored in detail the fault lines along which political authority and identity were contested and negotiated via religious idioms. For example, McAnany (1995) argues that tension between the institutions of kinship and kingship were played out in rituals involving ancestor veneration and were a major force in Maya political change (also see Carmean 1998; Iannone 2002). Yaeger (2003) argues that tensions surrounding variable identities and affiliations within the Terminal Classic Maya polity of Xunantunich were worked out in religious contexts ranging from rituals at the ceremonial center, feasting in hinterland communities, and the construction of ceremonial complexes by Xunantunich’s rulers at outlying sites. While most studies focus on political hierarchies as sources of social tensions that were played out in religious settings, some researchers have highlighted other dimensions of identity as sites of struggle, including gender, kinship, and ethnicity (Alt 2010; Buikstra and Charles 1999; R. Joyce 2000; Potter and Perry 2011). For example, gender was a focal point around which leadership was negotiated through the architectural settings and performance of mortuary ceremony in Mississippian and protohistoric societies of southern Appalachia (Sullivan and Rodning 2001). In Archaic-period Florida, tensions surrounding plural ethnic identities were worked out through the construction and use of ceremonial mounds (Randall and Sassaman 2010; Sassaman 2010).

Religious ritual may also have been a means through which dissatisfaction with or resistance to elite authority were expressed (Janusek 2005; Joyce and Weller 2007; Lucero 2007; Patterson 1986), and evidence from a number of regions indicates that elite and commoner rituals were not always congruent (e.g., Janusek 2004; McAnany 2002; Olson 2007; Smith 2002). For example, Janusek (2004, 2005) argues that within the Tiwanaku polity, ethnic diversity and a degree of local resistance to state authority was expressed via religious idioms that differed in subtle ways from those of the political center. These hidden transcripts of resistance became more public as political and economic conditions unraveled after ca. A.D. 1000, culminating in the ritual destruction of monuments that had assembled key aspects of Tiwanaku state religion and political authority. Rather than viewing religion as a set of social and material relations that arose to stabilize developing political hiera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1 New directions in the archaeology of religion and politics in the Americas
• 2 The mobile house: religious leadership at Chacoan and Chacoan revival centers
• 3 The elements of Cahokian shrine complexes and basis of Mississippian religion
• 4 Cherokee religion and European contact in southeastern North America
• 5 Unsettled gods: religion and politics in the Early Formative Soconusco
• 6 Religion, urbanism, and inequality in ancient central Mexico
• 7 Religion in a material world
• 8 Political engagement in household ritual among the Maya of Yucatan
• 9 Ritual is power? Religion as a possible base of power for early political actors in ancient Peru
• 10 Timing is everything: religion and the regulation of temporalities in precolumbian Peru
• 11 From landscape to ontology in Amazonia: the Llanos de Mojos as a middle ground
• 12 The multivalent mollusk: Spondylus, ritual, and politics in the prehispanic Andes
• 13 Power at the crossroads of politics and religion: a commentary
• Index