who have previously written on the subject are included in this group. Building upon themes of religious deity and other symbolic markers for clan territorial divisions (Sabo, Hilliard, Walker), urban settlement and modelling (Landau) and ethnographic information on ritual practice or cultural perspectives on land and spatial boundaries (Vining), these authors implicitly consider the possibility that cosmovision is a cultural universal. One unique aspect of their approach is the way that they connect varied landscapes with settlement concentrations or city centres, showing how cosmovision is evident in both rural and central place making.This Cambridge Archaeological Journal (CAJ) Special Section, focusing on New World ritual landscapes, develops themes related to 'cosmovision' in different cultures. Cosmovision is defined as a cultural group's view of the world, the structure of the universe and ideas about its origin or development, as interpreted through selected sets of symbols in the built or modified natural environment. Archaeologists and ethnographers increasingly use information about landscapes and cultural landmark placements in new ways to evaluate seasonally timed, circumnavigated or spatially dispersed ritual behaviour in a broader geographic context, extending beyond site centres into the wider political realm controlled by the people under study.Cosmovison is an extension of what has been called Weltanschauung or worldview by writers like Dilthey (1914), who used it to express nature, freedom, Erlebnis or lived experience, and idealism in philosophical doctrines of the Western tradition. Scholars use the word cosmovision to mean a certain world outlook within the context of values, mythology, religious beliefs and art, including geomantic architecture for time-space ritualized performance (Geertz 1980). The Maya people from present-day Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and México, for example, do not necessar-ily distinguish between the sacred world and daily life (Cochoy Alva et al. 2006;Tovar 2001). Processions are important components of religious observations, confirming cosmovision by moving people through the simultaneously sacred and mundane world. Processions still form a part of religious observation today.Ancient people mapped their views of the cosmos onto natural and built features to anchor their understanding of the world around them in three spatial dimensions and a fourth temporal dimension and to stake their territorial claims or to diagram ritual performance routes and places. In certain cases, ideas about human origins and founding practices, settling or planting a community are conflated in cosmograms. A cosmogram, as defined by Julia Hendon and Rosemary Joyce (2004, 326), is 'A representation of the entire universe through symbolic shorthand or artistic metaphor'. Archaeologists pay attention to how cosmology and ideology structure economic, political and religious systems, themes that have been productively explored in many parts of the world (Aveni et al.