Joseph Rivera: Plgrimage Last Mile

In an article by Hammond and Matthew called Pilgrimage’s Last Mile: Late Maya Monument Veneration at La Milpa, Belize, they discuss an interesting topic of the phenomenon of a long distance pilgrimage and how it is not too important to the process of visiting a sacred place. At first glance I believed that this might refer to Lane’s discussion about the ontological approach and how the sacred place generates its own sort of sacredness. After further reading though I discovered that Hammond and Matthew say that pilgrimage centers are only sustained by the traffic of the local area, so in a way it deals with Lane’s cultural approach. I believe I disagree with Hammond and Matthew because I think that if the pilgrimage center was in the middle of no where people would still travel to it if they found it to be a sacred place. This explains why there are some sacred place that have only a very few people living around them, like Mount Kilimanjaro.