E
veryone has rituals, some of them mundane and personal, such as brushing your teeth
or getting on the same bus at the same time every day to go home from work. Some
center on family, like using the pumpkin pie recipe each Thanksgiving that was handed
down by your mother. Others focus on faith, such as celebrating an important religious
occasion by attending services conducted in much the same way as they have been for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Some rituals celebrate your home
country, like Fourth of July fireworks. If you’re a baseball fan, you’ve
no doubt seen players perform very personalized rituals—tapping
their feet a certain number of times in the batter’s box, adjusting
their batting gloves before they step up to the plate, or pointing
at the sky to thank God or to acknowledge a lost loved one after
throwing a final blazing strike to end the game. All these rituals,
repeated over and over with absolute precision, serve to organize
our lives, to honor our ancestors, faiths, history, and country, and
to ensure or celebrate our successes.
In ancient cultures, rituals were also an integral part of people’s lives.
It is not surprising, then, that many of the stories we share with you in ArchAeology
concern how and why rituals were performed in the distant and not-so-distant past. In this
issue, you will read about how such diverse peoples as the Maya in Guatemala (“Magnetic
Mesoamericans”) and the Tiwanaku, whose territory included much of the land surround-
ing Lake Titicaca in Bolivia (“Sacred Rites of an Early Andean Empire”), used rituals to
control the people they governed. The Paiute, Ute, and Shoshone Indians of the North
American Great Basin (“The Prayerstone Hypothesis”) communicated with their ances-
tors and the divine by placing prayerstones in the landscape. And, for at least two officers
involved in the Battle of Peleliu, one of World War II’s most vicious engagements, a ritual
accompanied the end of their lives. After a pitiless two-month fight to defend this small
Micronesian island (“Place of the Loyal Samurai”), the Japanese forces were defeated, after
which a pair of commanders committed ritual suicide, a sacred rite that had been practiced
by Japan’s warriors since antiquity.4 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019EDITOR’S LETTER
Editor in Chief
Jarrett A. Lobell
Deputy Editor
Eric A. Powell
Senior Editors
Benjamin Leonard
Daniel Weiss
Associate Editor
Marley Brown
Editorial Assistant
Malin Grunberg Banyasz
Creative Director
Richard Bleiweiss
Maps
Ken Feisel
Contributing Editors
Roger Atwood, Paul Bahn,
Bob Brier, Karen Coates,
Andrew Curry, Blake Edgar,
Brian Fagan, David Freidel,
Tom Gidwitz, Andrew Lawler,
Stephen H. Lekson,
Jerald T. Milanich, Heather Pringle,
Kate Ravilious, Neil Asher
Silberman, Julian Smith,
Nikhil Swaminathan,
Jason Urbanus, Claudia Valentino,
Zach Zorich
Publisher
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Director of Circulation and Fulfillment
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Susan Pollock, Kenneth B. TankersleySubscription questions and address
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tel 718-472-3050 • fax 718-472-Jarrett A. Lobell
Editor in ChiefTHE ROLE OF RITUAL
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