religion and cosmology: The Americas American shamans as a hallucinogen Comparing these pipes to similar objects produced by recent Native North American groups suggests that the pipes might also have been “sucking tubes” employed by shamans to suck spirits of disease out of a patient’s body One pipe was sculpted into a figure of a man whose strange body shape suggests dwarfism or a goiter In historic Native American groups deformed individuals were sometimes viewed as having special connections to the spirit world One man buried in an Ohio Adena mound had his upper front teeth removed so that he could insert the upper jaw and fangs of a wolf into the space Was he a shaman thought to transform into a wolf during his trances? The Hopewell cultures of Ohio and Illinois (ca 200 b.c.e.–ca 400 c.e.) created massive square and circular enclosures bounded by earthen mounds and ditches These sites are free from domestic trash and objects associated with daily life, suggesting that they had a ceremonial use They are frequently located near springs, caves, mountains, and other landscape features regarded as sacred by later Native Americans, and some are aligned to permit observation of the solstices and equinoxes as well as other astronomical events Small wooden buildings associated with these earthworks may have been shrines or lodging for pilgrims visiting the sacred site from distant regions We not know what sorts of spirits were worshipped in these enclosures Human forms not show up frequently in Hopewell sculpture, but animals are shown in a realistic fashion on carved stone effigy pipes These sculptures face the smoker when the pipe is in use and could represent the animal spirit allies of shamans Stone and clay sculptures of men with single horns protruding from their foreheads hint that such ritual specialists were present in this culture Ancient West Mexican and 19th-century c.e Plains Indian shamans wore their hair in a similar fashion In one Hopewell sculpture a possible shaman is shown wearing a bearskin Among many later Native North American groups, bears are strongly associated with healing Hopewell burials yield bone tubes that may have been sucking tubes and copper headdresses in the form of deer antlers, possibly used by shamans in hunting magic At one Ohio Hopewell site, a face mask made out of a human skull could have been part of the costume of a shaman, perhaps for burial rites The Hopewell peoples buried their dead under mounds, frequently after keeping the bodies above ground in a shrine or charnel (a building or chamber in which the dead are kept) that was then ritually destroyed and buried They may have envisioned such events as releasing the spirits of the dead into the afterlife and renewing the world and the community in symbolic parallel to cycles of life and death in nature MESOAMERICA During the Early Formative (ca 1800–ca 1200 b.c.e.) in Mexico, village farmers produced and buried thousands of small clay figurines Most of these images represent women, sometimes with exaggerated breasts and hips Religious spe- 863 cialists might have used such objects as part of curing rituals, perhaps aimed at correcting infertility in both land and humans Other figures from central Mexico show masked and costumed males—perhaps the religious specialists themselves On the Gulf Coast of Mexico in the modern states of Tabasco and Veracruz, the Olmec civilization (ca 1500–ca 400 b.c.e.) constructed large sites with monumental architecture that served as both political capitals and religious centers Many archaeologists interpret Olmec religion as a kind of shamanism, but with the Olmec kings taking on the duties and traits of shamans as a way of justifying their claims to power Some small Olmec stone carvings show male figures apparently transforming into jaguars, the most common guardians or alter egos for Mesoamerican shamans Figures showing varying mixtures of human and feline features may represent different stages of the transformation The hallucinogenic “fuel” for this process might be indicated on one Jade votive ax of a figure combining human and animal traits and thought to represent a supernatural being, Olmec, from Mexico (1200–400 b.c.e.); the flaming eyebrows mimic the crest of an eagle, and the cleft in the head compares with the groove in the head of a jaguar (© The Trustees of the British Museum)