Writing on the walls: geological context and early American spiritual beliefs

Hough, Susan E.

doi:10.1144/gsl.sp.2007.273.01.09

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…Earthquakes are, of course, famously common in California. But tremors were understood as having supernatural causes and implications across the west coast, beyond California alone (e.g., Carver 1998;McMillan and Hutchinson 2002;Ludwin 2001;Ludwin et al 2005;Ludwin and Smits 2007;Thrush and Ludwin 2007;Hough 2007;Ruuska 2014;Stoffle 2022). In northwestern California, in fact, earthquakes were understood to result from a cosmic imbalance.…”

Section: Transient Natural Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontological Beliefs and Hunter–Gatherer Ritual Landscapes: Native Californian Examples

Whitley

2024

Religions

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Landscapes are socially produced and reproduced spaces. This is easily recognizable for large-scale urban groups with built environments that dominate living places. But it also pertains to all types of societies and cultures, even small-scale hunter–gatherers, once the ontological beliefs structuring landscape perception and use are acknowledged. The foragers of south–central and southern California and the Great Basin illustrate this fact. They maintained a widely shared ontological perspective supported by a fundamental cognitive postulate. This is that supernatural power, the principle causative agent in the universe, was differentially distributed among individuals and places. The distribution of power, revealed by certain geomorphological features and natural events, structured their perceptions of landscape. These perceptions were expressed in ritual and symbolism, including petroglyphs and pictographs as durable manifestations of ceremonies on the landscape. The ontological relationship between power and landscape explains a longstanding question in hunter–gatherer archaeology: Why were rock writing sites created at specific locations? It also explains another equally significant but rarely considered and related problem: Why do some localities have massive quantities of rock writings that dwarf most other sites? The landscape symbolism of and the placement of sites by Native Californian and Great Basin tribes is explained by reference to their shared ontological beliefs, illustrating how they structured their ritual practices and archaeological record.

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