Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Origin Period Start Year

This page groups sacred sites by the year their sacred standing is first dated to. Wikipedia notes that the relics of the apostle James "discovered c. 830" are what made Santiago de Compostela a pilgrimage destination. Browsing by start year lets a visitor compare how old one site's sacred status is against another's.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Marae, heiau, meae and ahu: walled open-air courts with a raised stone platform, the characteristic ritual structure of East Polynesia. Ritual authority was physically transmissible, a new marae being founded by carrying a stone from an older one, so the sites form a traceable network. 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
A cover term across the Polynesian triangle: Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Maohi of the Society Islands, Rapa Nui, Samoans, Tongans, Marquesans, Cook Islanders and others. They share an ancestral language and a common repertoire, and they are distinct peoples in what are now several separate states. 2
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
The division of the Pacific into Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia was proposed by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1832 and rested in part on judgements about race. Polynesia has outlived that origin as a sound linguistic and genealogical grouping; the threefold scheme as a whole has not. 2
Directory
Category
Sacred Sites 1
Learn More
Polynesian sacred sites

This small group gathers a sacred site of the wider Polynesian world, a marae, temple platform or sacred place of the island peoples of the Pacific, where the gods and ancestors were honoured.

The browser will find the site the atlas classes here. The entry describes its religious significance within Polynesian tradition.

Origin Period Start Year
Connections

Belongs to Tradition

Sites grouped for the Polynesian tradition.

Source On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, 2nd editionPatrick Vinton Kirch
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, 2nd edition
Patrick Vinton Kirch, University of California Press, 2017on East Polynesian ritual architecture
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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