Indigenous (Other Keyword)
151-175 (182 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative and Community Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2020, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) started planning for the state’s 76th state park focused on the late-eighteenth-century Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Little Miami River. ODNR was committed to working collaboratively with the three Shawnee Nations to design the park and its interpretive content. Over the last two...
Toward a Decolonized CRM: Challenges in Archaeological Stewardship and Interpretation for Virginia Tribes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long overdue federal acknowledgment of Virginia’s tribes has created a sea change for many of Virginia’s tribal communities over the last five years. Virginia now has seven federally recognized resident tribes, and an additional five tribes have state recognition. Virginian erasures of Native history have...
Toward a Household Archaeology of the Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca Iroquois) White Springs Site, circa 1688-1715 CE (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca Iroquois) White Springs site near Geneva, New York, was occupied circa 1688-1715 CE. The town, approximately 3.4 hectares in size and likely palisaded, was founded in the aftermath of the 1687 French-led Denonville invasion that destroyed several Onöndowa'ga:' towns and most of their agricultural fields. Cornell University-sponsored...
Tracing Sixteenth-Century Beads in South America to Understand Their Impact on Indigenous Ritual Practices and Material Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest (2018)
Studying beads and changes in use of beads in a given population provide insight into the impact of outside influences on people in a given population. This research identifies bead types that were valued by indigenous cultures in South America prior to the Spanish Conquest in the Sixteenth-Century, and compares their frequency in six geographic regions within Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia with the frequency of glass beads brought by the Spanish to the same regions. This study examines...
The Transformational Properties of Water and Rock Art (2018)
Water helps breach the rock surface in both physical and perceptual ways. The addition of water facilitates the production of petroglyphs not only by weakening the bond between particles in sedimentary rocks but also with the moist particles acting as an effective abrasive slurry. The addition of water to natural earth pigment powder allows the colorant to effectively enter pores and interstices. Many virtually invisible petroglyphs and pictographs "magically' appear when covered with a thin...
Tribal Consultation: What We Lose When It’s "My way or the highway" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over my years as Director of the Cultural Rights and Protection Department for the Ute Indian Tribe, I have seen tribal consultation in many different forms. In my presentation, I will be talking about tribal consultation as collaboration and how we can all move...
Uncovering the Mystery of the Lamar-like Clay Objects (2018)
For decades, stamped and plain clay objects recovered from post-contact Native American sites between the 1950s and 1990s in the Florida panhandle have puzzled researchers. The objects are believed to have been produced by the Apalachee Indians living in the region. However, little is known about the techniques used to manufacture them or what purpose they served. These artifacts are generally referred to as Lamar clay balls owing to some having stamped patterns similar to Lamar-like stamped...
Understanding And Interpreting Indigenous Places And Landscapes (2016)
Since the earliest encounters of Native Americans and Europeans, places and landscapes with thousands of years of use and history in the "New World" have been renamed, depleted of resources, appropriated and stolen. Despite almost 500 years of contact, colonialism and repression by European settlers and their descendants, Native tribes continue to define places on the landscape in terms of tribal understandings, meanings and uses. This paper addresses the topic of place and landscape...
Unresolved Indivisibility: Protecting and Respecting Ainu Intangible and Tangible Heritage (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Indigenous Issues in Hokkaido Island, Japan" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ainu conceptions of “heritage” connect worldview and place, knowledge and object, intent and action. As is the case in North America and elsewhere, current protection of Indigenous ancestral sites in settler countries foregrounds the tangible and its scientific value, at the expense of cultural values and needs. In the wake of...
Unsettling Settler-Colonial Archaeology: Constructing Indigenous Futurities at Puʻukoholā Heiau (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often thought of as a discipline that concerns itself with ruins—that which is in the past—archaeology also serves the settler-colonial project, in the present and the future. For that reason, archaeology inherently functions as a political tool, even if typically imagined as an apolitical means of “preserving” the past. In other words, archaeology offers...
Urban Renewal, Historic Preservation, and Indigenous Erasure (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban renewal and historical preservation are implicated in Indigenous erasure. Focusing on Providence, Rhode Island, I argue that the geographies of race and class of mid-20th century urban renewal have a longer-term history in 19th century land clearance projects. Among the disproportionate number of nonwhites affected were the city’s Indigenous people...
Ute "Prayer Trees", the Cultural Resource that Never Existed (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tribes regularly fight the destruction of their cultural resources and the appropriation of their culture. But what happens when someone appropriates a cultural resource that never existed in the first place? The three Ute tribes have been regularly engaged over the...
Ute Ethnographic Cultural Landscapes in Southeast Utah (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Transcending Modern Boundaries: Recent Investigations of Cultural Landscapes in Southeastern Utah" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Nuche, or Ute people, have been in their homelands across Colorado and Utah since time immemorial. Southeast Utah formed part of the larger movements of the Ute bands with connections to the area, which in turn formed part of the overall Ute movements across the entire Ute homeland. The...
Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Presevation Office Reflections on Tribal-Archaeologist Collaborations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Braiding Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges for Collaborative Approaches to Archaeological Heritage and Conservation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Historic Preservation Office has worked regularly with archaeologists. While archaeology focuses largely on scientific understanding, the effects of this work on tribes and other stakeholders also needs to be considered. Through this talk,...
Virtual Worlds: Underwater Archaeology and Indigenous Engagement (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Alpena-Amberley Ridge (AAR) is a landform that is now 100 feet underwater in the Great Lakes – but 10,000 years ago, it was a unique dry land environment. Research on the AAR has documented some of the world’s oldest hunting features including drive lanes and hunting blinds for targeting caribou. To better understand this submerged landform an...
Waterscapes Domestication: Ponds, Fish Weirs, and Evidence of Managed Aquatic Environments in Amazonia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal management and domestication have been widely studied in relation to terrestrial mammals; however, there are still debates over what “domestication” means for aquatic animals. Across the Amazon, in recent years, a great number of archaeological structures such as fish weirs, canals, ponds, and turtle and fish corrals have been documented, dating...
The Way Forward: Native and Non-Native Collaboration as well as Multi-disciplinary Research Strategies (2018)
As Native peoples assert their sovereignty over intellectual property as well as land and water, relationships between them and anthropologists are entering a new era characterized by collaboration as well as conflict. Ethical anthropologists in North America recognize that they need to secure tribal/First Nations permission for their research. Sometimes permission is granted only for projects of interest to the tribes themselves. And sometimes publication of that research for a wider audience...
"We ask only that you come to us with an open heart and an open mind": The transformative power of an archaeology of heart. (2017)
Indigenous scholars propose that the outside researchers most useful to indigenous communities are those willing to engage in a process of self-discovery and transformation. These researchers are willing to learn from, not just about, the people they work with. This paper contemplates the challenges and opportunities that arise when archaeologists embark on this transformative journey. I use personal examples drawn from two decades of conducting archaeology with and for indigenous communities to...
We Know Who We Are and What Is Needed: Achieving Healing, Harmony and Balance in Ndee Institutions (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ndee perceptions of the past bear directly on the present. Our institutions—lifeways, worldviews and overall continued well-being—are contingent upon our relationship to the land in the form of access, prayer, offerings, power acquisition and overall reciprocity. Intergenerational, ecological and...
Weaving Kin Studies and Multispecies Frameworks into Collaborative Paleoethnobotanical Research (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 20 years practitioners, activists, and scholars across disciplines have repeatedly pointed out the importance of incorporating other-than-human kin, relationality and reciprocity, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge into scientific practice when working with...
What Would Larry Do: Archaeological Practice with, by, and for Native American Communities (2018)
The fight for inclusion of Native Americans in archaeology and anthropology hasn’t been an easy road; it has been divisive, contested, and sometimes violent. The need for allies and advocates for Native American inclusion in the field has become apparent through the tireless work of Larry Zimmerman. His scholarship has shaped generations of archaeologists and anthropologists in numerous ways. The ethical dimensions of his work are a testament to the need for change in the field and are a...
What's In A Seed?: An Experimental Archaeological Study of Elderberry (Sambucas sp.) Processing on the Pacific Northwest Coast (2018)
Uncharred botanicals are commonly found on archaeological sites but seldom assigned interpretive significance owing to their assumed ambiguous origins. Thousands of uncharred, fragmented Sambucas racemosa (red elderberry) seeds have been recovered at Welqámex, a Stó:lō-Coast Salish settlement in the Upper Fraser Valley of southwestern British Columbia. In Stó:lō-Coast Salish territory and beyond, Sambucas was used as both a food and a medicine. Owing to the presence of cyanide-like...
When Is Creolization? (2018)
Multiple episodes of identity transformation can be seen in the archaeology of Mona island. From the emergence of "Taino-ness" (cf. R. Rodríguez) in the 12th century, to the catastrophic (after S. Mintz) eruption of colonial identities in the 16th century. We contrast the dynamics and character of creolizations from a diachronic and material perspective by looking at the archaeology of 500 years of subterranean ritual landscapes of Mona. We ask whether an expanded use of the term creolization is...
Where Text Meets Trowel: Using an Integrative Approach to Consider Internal Sociopolitical Dynamics at Postclassic Etlatongo (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca is fortunate to have an impressive corpus of pre- and postconquest ethnohistorical sources that have been the focus of intensive academic scrutiny. Yet, emphasis on these sources provides an incomplete picture where only the histories of polities mentioned in the texts are taken as central, often to...
Who Tells Your Story? Utilizing Legacy Collections to Serve a Living Culture (2019)
This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Unlike most archaeological collections, those held and curated by the Seminole Tribe of Florida (STOF) represent a living culture, and tribal understanding of those archaeological collections is a fluid, dynamic entity. The unique relationship between the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) and STOF requires an adherence to and respect of...