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It is likely that all people define themselves in part through their physical environment. We feel an attachment to our surroundings. We tell and listen to stories about them. We use them to remember the past, justify the present, and shape the future. Native peoples of the Americas likewise felt—as do their descendants of today—the importance of place, maintaining narratives of origin that linked themselves, their ancestors, and their deities to the natural as well as to the built landscape. The Mexica, of central Mexico, for example, specified a place to the northwest named Chicomoztoc ("Seven Caves") from which their original ancestors emerged to begin the southward journey to their eventual destination at Tenochtitlán. The location of Chicomoztoc remains a subject of speculation to this day. It likely was unknown to the Mexica by the time they entered the valley of Mexico despite their ability to describe it, recall it, and anchor events in that place. Similarly, we saw in this volume that "on the other side of the sea" represents a place, constructed through metaphor, that can be viewed as a place of origin for the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala; a place that can be recalled in narrative, and that can be utilized symbolically for various purposes. The chapters in this volume represent temporary destinations in a journey, rather long and winding, from north to south in cartographic terms, but also back and forth in time as well as space. It could be viewed, if we choose to see it thus, as our pilgrimage to the past from the present, and back, touching on a number of different worldviews or models of reality by means of which we have been able to experience concepts through the words of others, and thereby witness, features of the cognized landscapes, while learning of their meanings. Along the way we heard stories in various voices, about peoples of different eras, interpreted from distinctly diverse perspectives. It has been a vaguely familiar exploration, charting cartographies of the mind, and visualizing mountains, caves, and springs while synthesizing origin tales of belonging, memory, and power. The whole journey we were exploring the nature of the sacred in landform, image, and word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is based on a pilot project that was launched to test the validity of a series of hypothesis about the nature, structure, function and role of ushnu platforms in the Late Horizon Inka landscape of the Peruvian Andes. The theories to be tested were firstly whether ushnu platforms were constructed to a precise form that closely resembled the geological, geomorphological and hydrological characteristics of nearby mountains and the surrounding landscape. Secondly, whether the structures adhered to a system of interconnected ‘sight lines' linking landscape features in remote and widely dispersed parts of the Inka Empire. Thirdly, whether children (Capac Hucha), were selected to be brought to the ushnu, and to be sacrificed there, and placed in, under, or in close proximity to the structure. A collaborative research project was organized involving the Universidad Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga and Royal Holloway of the University of London with British Academy funding. The project involved the exploratory excavation of two high altitude ushnus in the department of Ayacucho. In addition, the sampling of lake sequences in close proximity to these structures was to be completed in order to facilitate the contemporary landscape reconstruction of areas around the ushnus. Aspects of mutual visibility between ushnus and other landscape features were to be investigated using GIS facilities available at Royal Holloway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mesoamerican myths of origin typically involve the concept of migration. Colonial sources and modern oral traditions of Aztec, Maya and other Mesoamerican groups relate that the people made the journey into their current territory from a distant place of creation on a route that involved several stages of travel. This paper will explore the concepts of origin places in Colonial K'iche'an text sources from Highland Guatemala. The accounts of origin places in the K'iche'an sources have thus far been interpreted literally, which led to various suppositions about the historical basis and actual geographical setting of these locations. Combining comparative ethnohistoric, ethnographic, and precolonial evidence from various types of sources, it will be argued that in the references to places and directions of origin historicity is subordinate to ideology. It can be shown that the concept of migration and origin has become an independent topos which on the one hand functions within the framework of Maya cosmology and relates to creation as the central paradigm of Maya mythology, and on the other hand acts as a principal means of legitimizing power by deriving authority from remote supreme centers. The analysis will focus on the interpretation of the metaphor "on the other side of the sea" which can be demonstrated to refer to a place of creation, a concept which may have deep roots in the cultural memory of the Mesoamerican past and calls for a re-analysis of Mesoamerican migration myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of huaca is so fluid as to become almost meaningless as an analytical tool unless it is defined specifically with reference to the topic at hand, that is, centers (Fig. 9.1). Huaca is also used here to refer to Sacred Places in the landscape, and how material objects, living things, including people, attain the status of huaca and have distinct symbolic meanings with reference to such places. Particular emphasis is given to how such Sacred Places are differentiated from secular space and the role(s) ushnus may play in status differentiation and sociocultural development. Huaca shrines (huacacuna) were powerful social and political places, and as they gained legitimacy worshipers would build temples or platforms and make offerings. The oracle at Pachacamac, located near present day Lima in southern coastal Peru, was in fact so powerful and highly venerated throughout the coast and highlands that even the Inca built a temple to the Sun (Inti) and to the Virgins of the Sun (mamaconas) at that locality and made offerings of textiles, gold and silver (Salomon and Urioste, 1991 [c. 1598-1608]:Chap. 22, Sect. 277). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of later articles data was presented, based on information about a ritual procession repeated by the Incas during eight days ending harvest in April, that, in fact, even a third observation of sunset was made in the antizenith direction as focused on Mt. Sucanca (Zuidema, 1993, 1996, 1997). This observation was made from a third point just outside Cuzco, in its valley and between the Ushnu and Mt. Quispicancha (Fig. 8.2). The procession would have followed a central part of the direction from Mt. Quispicancha to Mt. Sucanca and moved towards sunset on those days. Thus, we remain in doubt regarding the astronomical purposes that the Incas assigned to Mt. Quispicancha. In this study, I will not return to the problem as initially proposed by Aveni and me in 1981, but accept the astronomical conclusions that we arrived at then as essentially correct. Instead, the focus of this analysis is on the calendrical use of three ritual movements with visits that each began and/or ended at one or two of a set of four horizon points, including the two mentioned previously, said to be used for astronomical observation. Remarkably, these movements and visits were carried out, not in periods of days as reconstructed for the astronomical observation of those horizon points, but rather on quite different rationales. Analysis of these movements and their dates will clarify our understanding of their connection to the astronomical use of the horizon points, and thus, support and confirm the Incaic dates in their use for astronomical observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of rocky headlands and small islands reach into the sea along the southern coastline of the province of Manabí, Ecuador, outlying sentinels to the mainland and its forest-covered cordillera. This tropical oceanic landscape inspired and shaped religious practices from the time of earliest documented human presence there in the 4th millennium BC up to the arrival of the Spanish in the early fifteenth century. Yet the area, removed from those of denser population to north, east and south, has been largely considered peripheral also to the main streams of social and ideological development during the Formative period of Ecuador's pre-Colombian history. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the meaning of the landscape and its components, which include a number of major ceremonial and sacred sites. The relative invisibility of the constructed sites (as opposed to the natural landforms with which they were associated) has played a large part in the general failure to recognize their value. There can be no comparison between the size of the small scale wooden structures and clay platforms of even the largest Formative settlements and ceremonial centers in Ecuador with the massive stone built huacas of neighboring Perú and the great complexes of more distant Mesoamerica. Furthermore, Ecuadorian Formative sites are mostly long buried by alluvial soils or the anthropogenic deposits of subsequent occupation. Another factor has been the shortage of careful field work and full final reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Guarani people currently occupy a large area of the Bolivian Gran Chaco (Fig. 6.1). They speak a language which belongs to the Tupí-Guaraní linguistic family which historically covered a wide territory in the greater Amazon basin. According to tradition, Guarani groups moved west into the region that is today Bolivia seeking the "Ìvì Maraëì"—"Land Without Trouble" prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. When the Spanish entered the Chaco, the "Chiriguanos" Guarani of Isoso were established and well-organized, having earlier defeated the "Chanés" and other groups in the area. Guarani were defeated by the Bolivian state in 1896, at the massacre at Kuruyuki. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This fascination for the origin of things carries over into the more public Maya ritual offerings, processions and ceremonies. Nearly all their major ceremonies deal with creation and rebirth in one way or another. The world in which the Maya live is difficult, sometimes cruel. It is a source of great hope that through prayer, sacred ritual, and offerings, the world and its sacred guardians can return to the moment of their first creation in order to be reborn to new life in a pure, uncorrupted form. It is this periodic renewal, which allows life itself to continue. If these rituals are not performed in the proper way and under the proper circumstances, the Maya believe that they and all creation would simply slip back into primordial darkness, chaos and perpetual death. For the Maya who continue to practice their ancient traditions, storytelling and sacred rituals in the night are not simply the idle retelling or reenactment of events from long ago. Words and movements that follow ancient precedent have the power to make those present witnesses and participants in the events described. As Houston and Stuart note with regard to the ancient Maya, kings who performed sacred drama clothed in the garments of deity were not merely engaged in mummery, but shared in the divinity of those gods. They were not "theatrical illusion but a tangible, physical manifestation of a deity" (Houston and Stuart, 1996:299). When the modern Maya storyteller begins his tale with the phrase, "let us spend this night with our ancestors," in a sense, he or she means it quite literally. Such experiences have the power to transport those present back to the moment of first beginnings. The darkness of the room and the silence of the sparsely populated mountain terrain of such communities resonate with the soft sounds of the storyteller's voice—leaving the listeners with the almost palpable sense that they are in an ancient place that once existed before the first dawning of the sun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Castilian conquerors of Mexico and Central America were quite effective in their efforts to destroy documents that might reflect a complex culture with a deep understanding of history and place. When Pedro de Alvarado came to and burned the capitol of the second largest empire of Mesoamerica, along with its kings, we can only speculate what else was committed to those flames. But among those who survived were well-educated bards in service to the court, who some scholars suspect kept the contents of the burned books in their heads, only to later commit them to European paper in Latin letters, in secret, over a generation later (Tedlock, 1985.) The book thus produced is most commonly called the Popol Vuh, or Book of Council. While the original remains hidden or lost, a Spanish friar made a copy from that original K'iche' over a 150 years later, and a variety of translations began to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is now the national book of Guatemala, there are numerous translations, and a rich field of interpretation, to which in a small way this chapter contributes (also see Earle, 1983b.) A central theme of the book's mythic tales involves decent by heroic twins from the surface of this holy earth into the underworld, where they meet with challenges from the lords of death and sickness. The first generation is defeated, after a series of travails. The second pair, miraculous offspring of the skull of one of the first, make a better go of it, despite being sent to many of the same life and death trials, an excerpt of which is quoted above. Of all the intimidating places to survive in the deadly territory of Xibalbaj, I have always wondered what was the danger of the house of bats. The others were clear. Cold, knives, jaguars, fire all seemed inherently fatal, but this danger I assumed, as did Dennis Tedlock, was that these bats were "monstrous beasts" of another dimension, bats out of hell, so to speak. Yet my doubts remained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they designed their ceremonial and civic urban centers, ancient Mesoamerican artists and architects often made visible their culture's creation-and-origins story.1 When building pyramids or siting temple complexes it was not unusual to replicate certain natural features that they considered to be the places that gave birth to their original ancestors. Such structures conceptually collapsed the distance between primordial and present time as well as the space between mythic places and the one in which the temple stood. For example, the two shrines of the Great Temple of the Aztec (AD 1325-1521) capital emulated two mythical sacred mountains. One side represented Tonacatepetl, the Mountain of Sustenance that held the seeds and water that would become human food. The other stood for Coatepec, Serpent Mountain, upon which the tribal deity was re-born and where he defeated the female of the old regime, his elder sister. In the past few decades, Aztec specialists have been able to reconstruct this kind of integration among origins stories, mythical landscape, and actual urban constructions because of the convergence of archaeological remains with surviving pictorial and written texts from the early sixteenth century. Understanding the relationships between landscape and origins has been harder for earlier civilizations. Nevertheless, this topic has fascinated many scholars, some of whom have investigated even the oldest civilizations. Beatriz de la Fuente (1996) and F. Kent Reilly (1999, 2002) have written about certain Olmec (1200-400 BC) sculptures and urban constructions as evidence for a much earlier creation story. They have provided provocative views of how parts of ancient sites seem to prefigure later stories. But, given the lack of a fully developed system of writing prior to 600 BC, it has seemed impossible that we would ever have a good sense of the scope of an Olmec creation-and-origins narrative. However, by reconstructing the "find" locations of the now-removed monuments of the site called La Venta and considering their forms and symbols in relation to later creation narratives, I propose that we may catch a glimpse of one of the first times a cosmogonical vision was integrated into urban form in Mesoamerica. Such a glimpse is the goal of this chapter. It seeks to determine whether at a specific moment in La Venta's existence, its designers organized monuments and landforms in a visual narrative of creation-and-origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As this volume makes clear, origin places are much more than the spaces in which humans first appeared. The first instance of certain critical practices are often just as important as the creation of humans. For Mesoamericans in particular, the first fire, the first sunrise, and the first sacrifice are often major events in sacred narratives (Hamann, 2002). Tales of the origins of practice complement human creation tales by modeling behavior that is seen as integral to the functioning of human society (López Austin, 1996:17-18). This chapter explores one such originary act, that of ballcourt sacrifice, in a specific Ancient Mesoamerican setting—the Classic Veracruz site of El Tajín. El Tajín was the capital of a regional culture that flourished in north central Veracruz (Mexico) from c. A.D. 650-1000. During that period, ballcourt construction and ballgame-related accouterments were a major facet of the regional culture. The center of El Tajín contained 11 masonry courts, and the regional culture produced large quantities of finely carved stone objects called yokes, palmas, and hachas that were closely associated with ballcourt ritualism. The imagery associated with these objects and courts emphasize the decapitation of a sacrificial victim in a ballcourt context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]