Sacred Sites, Holy Places - The 59th Annual Missouri Valley History Conference (original) (raw)

An 86-Year Perspective on Archaeological Survey in Missouri

Missouri Archaeological Society Quarterly, 2021

In 1984, on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Missouri Archaeological Society (MAS), an article by Eric van Hartesveldt was published in MAS Quarterly 1(4). It was entitled “A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Archaeological Survey of Missouri.” The article provided a brief history of the efforts of archaeological site recording in Missouri from 1934 to 1984 and included a map showing the breakdown of sites recorded by county. By including this figure, the author hoped to illustrate the geographic trends that had characterized site recording during this period and to highlight those counties where relatively few sites had been recorded. It was hoped that MAS members would work to redress this imbalance. Much has changed in our world and in the Missouri archaeological community since 1984, including the trends of archaeological site recording in the state. I was invited by the editors of MAS to provide an update on this subject as a retrospective on the trends that have characterized site recording in Missouri over the past 36 years. Following on the 1984 article, I have also provided a map (Figure 1) showing the numbers of sites by county as they stand at the time of writing, although by the time you read this the numbers will already be out of date since over the course of a year the Missouri SHPO averages about two new site form submissions per day.

Workshop on Sacred Places Funded by the Philipp Schwartz-Initiative

Sacred Places: Changing Interconnections Between Religion and Politics, 2019

Sacred places around the world play an important role in shaping our understanding of religiosity, society, politics and culture. In the 21st century, sacred places worldwide have gained new attributes, becoming important identity indicators for diasporic communities, and constituting multicultural crossroads in border areas and along the symbolic boundaries between different groups. The workshop will focus on the ethnic and territorial aspects of religion by studying sacred places that are located on borders between cities, states, and ethnic/religious regions, as well as in conflict zones and disputed territories. We wish to explore how sacred sites are becoming increasingly relevant in dictating, shaping, and negotiating geopolitical zones, ethnic identities, collective memory, and new political attitudes, as well as in reinventing cultural identities. Moreover, we wish to investigate how sacred places are being instrumentalised in relation to political as well as cultural boundaries between communities and borderlands in different places worldwide.

In Lieu of History: Mormon Monuments and the Shaping of Memory

Dialogue, 2010

The farther I go the more certain I am that the path towards my object does not exist. I have to invent the road with each step, and this means that I can never be sure of where I am. A feeling of moving around in circles, of perpetual back-tracking, of going off in many directions at once. And even if I do manage to make some progress, I am not at all convinced that it will take me to where I think I am going. Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.-Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude 1 As a missionary in France and Belgium, I frequently encountered devout Catholics who would describe their journeys to Lourdes or Fatima. "Ah, oui! J'ai vu la grotte, la grotte où la Vierge s'est apparue à Bernadette! J'étais lá!" While these humble women, dressed in robin-egg-blue housecoats, could not bring home a piece of the cross, they could show me their holy water, rosary beads, or skinned knees, emblems of their devotion and commitment. Their pilgrimage was no trite tourist trip. They didn't watch the spectacle with ironic detachment, rolling their eyes at the commodification of sacred space. Non! They walked on holy ground. I nodded and smiled. But I confess that the stories amused me. Holy water indeed. Those fanciful narratives were a counterpoint to the dull sermons I heard preached in off-white cinder-block chapels as a child. Speakers would often disparage such pilgrimages, emphasizing the holiness that is available to all of us here and now. What these sermons expressed, with an almost uncanny echo of nine

6. The Context of Religion at Cahokia: The Mound 34 Case

Recently archaeologists have focused their attention on the role of re­ ligious belief and practice in human social history. For the Mississippian cul­ tural world of the American Southeast, the latest perspective was presented in The Art Institute of Chicago's 2004 exhibition volume Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand. Taking our lead from that publication, in this essay we elaborate on how Cahokia's beliefs and practices may be drawn from the Dhegiha Siouans' cultural world. While Muskogean oral traditions have been used to interpret Mississippian religion, recent scholarship has focused on the Dhegiha Siouan speakers' rich ethnographic record for midwestern Mississippian groups. Starting from highly specific Dhegiha Siouan beliefs about the human fertility powers of the falcon, this essay builds a case for interpretations based on a mixture of general analogy; archaeological context, and continuity of highly specific imagery. Mississippian platform mound construction is cus...