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The game of chunkey, believed to have originated at Cahokia, the preeminent ceremonial center in North America, may have been a variant of the "pole and ring" games. It was likely adopted by the Cahokian elite for funerary events, rituals tied to corn cultivation, and bore mythological significance in the Red Horn cycles among Chiwere-Siouan-speaking peoples, especially the Ioway and HoChunk (Winnebago), and the Dhegihan Siouan-speaking peoples. Red Horn and his progeny are depicted in various rock art, Braden-style statuettes, copper plates, and gorgets from the Mississippian period. These artifacts, including a pipe from Spiro, Oklahoma, and the Birdman figure identified with Red Horn, are connected to Cahokia, where the Red Horn cycle was represented, illustrating the hero's journey through death and rebirth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses lacrosse in the Great Lakes region, characterized by the use of a single racket, distinct from the Iroquois variant. The oldest surviving racket, collected by G. C. Beltrami in 1823, is presently preserved at the Caffi Museum in Bergamo, Italy. The Beltrami racket holds considerable cultural significance, not just as the oldest known lacrosse racket from 1823, but also for its unique characteristics. It is about half the size of a typical racket found in the Great Lakes region, and its distinctive features include an indentation at the top of the narrow inner side of the shaft, a pattern of engraved triangles, and a series of fire marks that repeatedly form the number 12. These features conceptually connect it to other items in the same collection, like the ball-headed club, the antler sword club, and the Wabeno double-headed drum. The racket's characteristics imply that it was likely owned by a member of the Wabenowin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War clubs were the preferred fighting weapon because Native American warriors could increase their social status by killing their enemies in single combat. In Mississippian art, they were often depicted in conjunction with images and symbols of war. One type of club, now called a sword club, appears to have originated in the South and perhaps in Mexico. They were also popular among the Iroquois and northern New England tribes. Gunstock clubs, found in the western Great Lakes region and Eastern Prairies, are generally considered a western variant of the sword club. The ball-headed club was also a western variant of the sword club and was common from the mid and northern Atlantic coast to the western Great Lakes. In this context, this article analyses the three war clubs purchased by Beltrami in 1823 in the upper Mississippi and Red River area: a sword club, a ball club, and a gunstock club, now in the Caffi Museum in Bergamo, Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts from a cue provided by some Algonquian etymologies, from the Proto Algonquian term *wi-nteko-wa, through a series of cognates in the various Algonquian languages. These words develop four meanings: that of windigo, a cannibal spirit or a human who becomes a cannibal, that of owl, that of specter, ghost, and that of madman, jester. Connected to these meanings, there are a series of gods, mythical characters, practitioners of the sacred and ceremonies, whose origins are prehistoric and are linked to the diffusion of the cultural-ritual-economic-bellic complex of corn farming from Mesoamerica to the Great Lakes. The importance of the Venus cycles, the relationship between the Morning Star, warfare, and winter, and the Wabenowin, the Dawn Society of the Anishinabe tribes are prominent within this complex. Finally, I will explore the meaning of the Wabeno paintings of the drum collected by Beltrami in 1823 and housed in the E. Caffi Museum in Bergamo, Italy, as well as its probable owner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an updated version of the article "La culla di Beltrami e altre storie", published in Italian in 1993. The Beltrami Collection, made up of the objects he brought back from his travels, has been divided for a long time: a part was kept at the Museum of Natural History E. Caffi in Bergamo, Lombardy, and a part was at Luchetti House in Filottrano (Ancona, Marche). Only very recently the two parts have been reunited in Bergamo: it constitutes the earliest group of objects from Minnesota in Europe. I believe that the items divided between the Beltrami collection at the museum "E. Caffi" in Bergamo and the Luchetti collection in Filottrano form a single artifact, that is, a cradle of the type called "cradleboard", of which only the parts decorated with porcupine quills survive today. The cradleboard was collected in 1823 by G. Costantino Beltrami probably near Fort Snelling (ex Fort Anthony) among the Eastern Sioux, probably the Santee Mdewakanton who had their village in Kaposia, very close to the fort and represents the most ancient specimen of Santee Sioux cradleboard currently preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platform capitalism in its own way adopts tools used at the end of the last century by powerless people to make their critical voices heard by means of boycotting as well as alternative cultural proposals, and turns gender issues into ethnic ones. It destroys class solidarity (typical of manufacturing capitalism) by transforming people into social users where ‘one is worth one’ and the important ‘commodity’ they produce are personal data. It also creates communities essentialized as ethnic groups: i.e. the queer and the transgender communities, who are no longer individuals with a sexual preference, but groups that claim rights and protections superior to and different from those of others. We propose here to demonstrate how the process of ethnicization in the Anglo-Saxon countries, and in particular in the USA, Canada and Great Britain, is spreading to other advanced countries by the way of the culture of the politically correct and is ethnicizing them through the cancel culture. In the LGBT+ area this ethnicization has extended to reach a legal and linguistic occupation of territories that tends to the cancellation of (biological) women not only from the public sphere but, in perspective, even physically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

King Matruk is a well-known character in the Vittorio Veneto area: Archbishop Minuccio de' Minucci, in full swing Counter-Reformation, narrated that Matrucus, a Germanic-speaking barbarian warrior king, persecuted Christians and did not scruple to torture and kill his daughter Augusta, later Saint Augusta. I believe that Matrucus was not a Germanic warrior, but a Celtic character possibly connected with the archaic cult of the bear and the feasts related to the spring equinox and the end of the harvest, in which the battle between spring and winter was celebrated. An analysis of the legend of St. Augusta and King Matruk shows that Augusta and Matruk belong to the much older Venetic and Celtic layers, which left us a number of toponyms as well as sanctuaries in the area. There are aspects of the landscape that are also connected with Matruk and Augusta. In sum, we have a multi-layered tradition of remarkable antiquity, which shows the merging of Venetic, Celtic and Roman traditions in a border territory, as well as their continuation in both the Christian hagiographic legend and Saint Augusta's cult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze first the relationship between tourists and natives in a liminal area such as the villages built on the road that takes tourists to Mursiland, and the dialogical construction that derives from it, which is in all respects a representation, and secondly in which way tourism has changed external and internal relations in the Mursi society. The dialogue between these two groups, tourists and Mursi, gives rise to an image that is the product of both the expectations of the visitors, and the idea Mursi women, the main subject of the photos, have about these expectations. The outcome is a representation of the savage who often conflicts, given its aggressiveness, venality and unreliability with that of the kind, well-mannered Rousseau-an primitive. In this liminal area, with the mimesis of the wild Savage, the Mursi on the one hand enter the market economy and globalization, but maintaining some control in the process. On the other hand, they adapt their society by creating new figures of cultural brokers, as well as allow the weaker sector of society, girls and women, to acquire 'agency' and access to a new type of wealth, money, and not only cattle on which the Mursi's patriarchal society is based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I'trying to show that there is a relationship between rock art, a site where rock art is placed and the wider landscape, articulated according to the Camunian "mindscape" in Valcamonica, Italy. In particular, I believe rock art may be regarded, making Lødøen's felicitous phrase my own, as a 'consumption of souls' within an animistic understanding of the world. I think the importance of mining copper and iron in relation to petroglyphs in Valcamonica has been underestimated so far, and I have tried to show its strong symbolic relationships. I believe I have made quite clear the symbolical connections between a certain type of landscape, a gulch with a strong hydrocentric focus, thundering noises, mining, metallurgy and deer, thanks to linguistic analysis, which shows how the same kind of landscape and similar mythologies can be found over an extremely wide territory. We do not know what the religious beliefs of the ancient Camunians were, similarities with neighboring populations aside, but linguistic analysis, anthropological as well as archaeological comparison and the study of both local folklore and archaic Aegean beliefs, allows us to hypothesize a more detailed picture of the Camunian thought in the Iron Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this article is about traditional Russian embroidery and, in particular, some figures that are interpreted as archaic female deities. Initially studied by Tsarist and Soviet archaeologists and ethnographers, it found a renewed interest among American scholars linked to the feminist world. Embroidery, however, distinct from the archaeological material, for many centuries after the fall of paganism in Russia, has remained a component of the life of the people and, therefore, underwent important changes. The particular political coloring of the works on traditional Russian embroidery has influenced the interpretations of their origin and development, precisely during a period that saw the disappearance, even violent, of the rural way of life that had produced the embroidered fabrics collected by intellectuals, aristocrats, as well as Soviet officials, who transformed a family product into a commodity and then into a museum object detached from its context and transformed into a symbol of the 'authentic' Russian soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically the Mohawks survived as a political-ethnic entity thanks to massive adoptions of people from other tribes, as well as European countries. They counted more 'galvanized' Mohawks than full-blooded ones already at the end of the 17th century. While they stopped adopting whole tribes after the Mourning/Beaver Wars, in the 18th century they still went on the warpath in order to take prisoners to adopt (those for sacrifice were a minority) as far as the Carolinas and Georgia. They managed to save their identity even during the 19th century, when many intermarried with the neighboring Whites, although the first cause of tribal turmoil were the repeated attempts of the 'conservative' minority to evict the so-called 'mixed-blood'. After the early 1970s the policy of evictions has changed: from the aim of a group of extremist militants in order to forcibly expel the 'non-Mohawks', that is the mixed-bloods and their relatives from the reservations, it has become a tribal council policy, which uses the manipulation of the blood quantum, used by the Canadian and US bureaucracies to define Indians, to evict political troublemakers and to check population growth, and especially the distribution of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have been debating the relationship between the tourist and the pilgrim for a number of decades, using in a somewhat loose way terms such as vacation, travel and tour. The etymologies of the words used for travel, journey, voyage and tourism, as well as vacation, holiday, feast and fair, and the history of both classical and medieval European travels and pilgrimages tell a story of work and leisure, market fairs and religious festivals, pious pilgrims and frivolous travellers, connecting pilgrimage and tourism as the two sides of the same coin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was supposed to be a simple review of the book by Baldini, but after reading it, it developed into something different and more extensive, I would say an 'extended' review. When I bought it, I thought I would read a book that combined philosophy and anthropology, but after a few pages it was clear to me that it did not speak about neither of them, and that I was confronted with a book of a religious nature, impregnated with profound mysticism. Baldini inscribes his research into that religious movement known as Neo-Paganism, which also includes Neo-Shamanism, the Movement of the Goddess, Wicca, etc., but which has its roots in the European mystical, esoteric and traditionalist intellectual currents, American trascendentalism, joined by forms of oriental mysticism, Hindu universalism, as well as Native American and Central Asian/Siberian neo-shamanism. In the 1960s-1970s these currents formed the New Age, that is what Bloom calls Californian orphism, a minority but important current of the post-Christian West, which has influenced both part of the feminist movement and a number of counter-cultural intellectuals and grass roots as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The myth, like war, is a continuation of politics by other means. Athenian thinkers, including Euripides, saw Medea as the representative of both Corinthian Dorians and the womb's power threatening Athena, as the representative of Athenian (asexual) autochtonous ideal. The liminal and chthonic characteristics of Corinthian Medea were used to turn her into a witch and an Erynis. Similarly to Thucydides, Euripides shows the conflict between moderation (Athens) and excess (Corinth), rationality (Athens) and passion / thumos (Corinth). Medea, whose metis is Corinth's main identity trait, was opposed as unfair to Athena's politically correct metis, not only by the tragedians, but also by pottery artists in the years of the Peloponnesian War. Yet, Medea was protected by Themis and Zeus, and Athens' future was insecure at best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates and develops two speeches I made at the Forum of the General States of the Historical Re-enactment held in Florence on 9-10 April 2016 and will be included in the White Paper as a result of the Forum. The first part is also a preview of the long field work at a number of archaeological open museums, better known as archeoparks, during the last four years, I conducted as a participant observer, who has not remained a 'marginal native', but in some cases took a leading role. Thanks to this period of intense fieldwork, I was able to see the strengths and weaknesses of a number of Italian archeoparks. The second part, however, is more theoretical and concerns the problem of the "authentic reconstruction" of the past and the tension between traditional roles and modern requirements in the historical re-enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medea is generally known as a murderous witch due to hostile Athenian propaganda, but myth, iconography and linguistics allow us to suggest a new Medea, not only an agricultural goddess, but also a goddess of fermentation and wine, connected with Dionysus as well as Greek traditions about the diffusion of viticulture. This Medea, however, is mostly centred in the Corinthian tradition and especially in the Heraion of Perachora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the perception of color and the meaning of brilliance among archaic and ancient European populations and its association with language. Topics discussed include studies showing a strong awareness of the red range of the spectrum, while the blue range is the dominant trend in Akkadian and Egyptian texts; languages that do not have separate words for blue and green and use a term that covers both; and sources of natural colors in ancient times.

The article discusses the study on the Navajo Tree of Life weaving pattern. It provides a background of the Tree of Life design which is believed to have originated in Central Asia from shamanic cultures. It adds that the pattern is popular in carpets and rugs in Central Asia and that it became successful in the American Southwest during the 1970s. The study reportedly revealed the origin of carpet weaving and the origin of the Tree of Life concept.

The article discussed the Tree of Life design from Central Asia to Navajoland. It highlights the Trees of Life in Mexico in the pre-Hispanic cultures such as Ceiba which connects the three layers of the world. Among the topics discussed include mythical Paradise of Tlaloc, Tepantitla mural, and obverse of the Mixtec Codex Bodley begins with Lady One Death's birth from a tree.