Download or read book Feasting with Shellfish in the Southern Ohio Valley written by Jurgen Bar and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mid twentieth century assessments of the shell mounds saw them as the products of culturally simple societies that cared little about their dead and were concerned only with food. More recent interpretations, while attributing greater complexity to these peoples, have viewed the sites as mere villages and stressed such factors as population growth and climate change in analyzing the way these societies and their practices evolved. Claassen, however, makes a persuasive case that the sites were actually the settings for sacred rituals of burial and renewal and that their large shell accumulations are evidence of feasts associated with those ceremonies. She argues that the physical evidence including the location of the sites, the largely undisturbed nature of the deposits, the high incidence of dog burials, the number of tools per body found at the sites, and the indications of human sacrifice and violent death not only supports this view but reveals how ritual practices developed over time.