Social Memory (Other Keyword)
1-25 (25 Records)
This paper attempts to circumvent the dichotomy of remembering/forgetting and instead focuses on the process of slimming down or building up social memory. Such an emphasis attends to the question of not whether something is remembered or forgotten, but the push-and-pull of how it is remembered: the details, valences, politics, pulses, and potency. It also considers archaeology – in its practices and in its objects – firmly within that collective and often national process, not separate from it....
Ceremonial Practices, Feasts, and Persistent Places: A Ritually Mounded Landscape Constructed by Hunter-gatherers in Southern California (2017)
Shellmounds have not been recognized as prominent ritual features in southern California, despite evidence to the contrary. The largest extant shellmound in the region is on Santa Cruz Island, measures 270 by 210 meters (roughly 45,000 m² in area), is 8 m higher than the terrace it rests on, is covered with 50 house depressions, and dates to 6000-2500 BP. In the 1920s, three cemeteries were excavated at the top of El Montón; one young woman stood out among the over 200 individuals in that she...
Constructing Social Memory: Inca Politics and Sacred Landscape in the Lurin Valley (2017)
We will discuss the characteristics and scope of Inca politics in the Lurin Valley by focusing on the results of excavations carried out by Makowski (2016) in Pachacamac with its famous Imperial Inca temple and oracle, as well as in the administrative center Pueblo Viejo – Pucara. The comparison of landscape transformed by Imperial infrastructure between the Highlands of Cuzco (Christie 2016) and the lower Lurin Valley allows to reconstruct the mechanisms through which social memory was...
The Creation of Colonial Sacred Space and Landscapes around Nevado Sajama, Bolivia (2016)
Around the mountain of Sajama in western Bolivia exists a network of pre-Hispanic linear pathways that connect villages, chapels, churches, and hilltop altars. These pathways were primarily used in the Colonial era (1532-1825) but are still used by the local Aymara people for fiestas and rituals. The creation and transformation of this space demonstrates a changing ritual practice that occasionally reused pre-Hispanic places to combine Catholic and Andean sacred elements. Through this...
The Early Intermediate Period Farmer’s Almanac: Co-Producing Agriculture, Time, and Community on the North Coast of Peru. (2017)
Previous research on plant foods and social memory in the Andes has primarily focused on ritual feasting amongst elite segments of society within the confines of exclusionary monumental spaces. However, it is vital to look beyond elite-directed activities and consider ritualized commoner and quotidian practices as integral to community building and memory making. This paper will demonstrate how domestic food production and consumption, the construction of agricultural landscapes, and wild plant...
Exploring Mimbres Social Memory through Burials and Architecture (2017)
Social memory has become a topic of increasing investigation in the field of archaeology. While social memory in archaeology can often be very theoretical and abstract, it can also be very tangible and concrete in its archaeological manifestations. In this poster, I illustrate various social memory practices with specific emphasis on the reference process, strengths of associations, and intimacy past peoples had with their history as observed in architecture and burials in the Mimbres region of...
Feasting, Ritual Practices, and Persistent Places: New Interpretations of Shellmounds in Southern California (2016)
Intensive archaeological investigations at the largest extant shell mound in the Santa Barbara Channel area and one of the best-preserved Early Period archaeological sites in the region have produced an array of radiocarbon dates within solid stratigraphic contexts. Approximately 50 house depressions situated in rows on several terraces have been mapped on the eight meter high mound that measures 270 by 210 meters, approximately 5 hectares. Analysis of multiple lines of evidence, including...
In small things remembered; the sponge decorated ceramics from Inishark, Galway. (2013)
In recent years excavators along the western seaboard of Ireland and Scotland have recovered extensive evidence on domestic sites for the presence of Spongewares and other mass-produced ceramics dating to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The recovery of this material has opened the debate on the ‘marginal’ nature of such landscapes which has fostered divergent theoretical approaches questioning consumer choices in post-Famine Ireland at odds with received subaltern narratives of...
The Inscribed Word vs. the Spoken Word in African History and Archaeology (2013)
Pierre Nora got it wrong when he drew a distinction between inscribed history and social memory. By making this unfortunate dichotomy he unwittingly amplified a long standing separation between the written word and the spoken word in history making. The writings of F. Lwamgira in NW Tanzania provide a poignant study from which insights emerge about the speciousness of such distinctions. Lwamgira's writings take on an authoritative quality by becoming materially inscribed representations of Haya...
Lives of Baskets, Lives of Weavers: Using Digital Heritage and Interdisciplinary Research to Restore Social Memory (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “Entangled,” his landmark theoretical work on the relationship between human beings and material culture, Ian Hodder emphasized the importance of understanding how things endure differently than people. Thus longer-lived objects can bridge gaps and carry meaning between multiple...
Living on the Spine of the World: Placemaking at Early Community Centers, Rincon, UT (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In southeast Utah, two of the most dominant geographical features, Comb Ridge and the San Juan River, converge in dramatic fashion. Several large villages at the intersection of these features represent central places for wider communities from 500 BCE through at least 900 CE. While the three largest sites represent different time periods, each maintained...
Long-term Memory, the Individual and the Community in the later Prehistory of the Levant (2015)
Shared historical memory is a given feature of every human society as a basic component of group identity and cohesion. With increasing tendencies towards sedentism the material culture evidence for communal memory increases, as reflected in spatial correlates at both the inter- and intra-site levels. It appears that social stress, deriving from increased community sizes and staying together for prolonged periods of time in close proximity, amongst others, raised the need for mechanisms to...
Making the Invisible Visible or How Culture History Can Have An Impact (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper treats Archaeology as an exercise in revitalizing social memory. In it we detail the current development of the Anthropology degree program at Medgar Evers College CUNY. Emphasizing anthropology and archaeology as a means to promote the underrepresented narratives of marginal groups in the Americas, the program also provides the knowledge required...
Memories of New Pasts in Cuzco and Huarochirí (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, historical and anthropological understanding of the late prehispanic Andes was based in large measure on the written texts produced during the periods of Spanish invasion and colonization. However, while scholarly work based on these documents has long emphasized that control and manipulation of social memory was central to the expansion of the...
Persistence and Material Mnemonics in the Cosma Basin: 5000 Years of Ritual Enactment in the Upper Nepeña River, Peru (2017)
The Cosma Complex is located in the Cordillera Negra at the headwaters of the upper Nepeña River Valley, Ancash Peru. Fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 documented repeated reconstruction episodes associated with the reuse of monumental ritual architecture originally dated to the Late Preceramic (3000-1800 BCE). By the Early Horizon infant remains and other offerings were placed into earlier architectural contexts as a final capping episode on at least one mound. As settlement patterns...
A Place for the Living, A Place for the Dead: Social Memory at the Ancient Maya Hinterland Community of San Lorenzo, Belize (2017)
Public structures across the Maya lowlands functioned as materializations of ideology, memory, and identity. However, documentation of public ritual structures is typically limited to formal ceremonial centers. Little is known about public spaces within hinterland communities. Excavations at the site of San Lorenzo offer insight into the use and transformation of ritual space within a hinterland community. Recent excavations of a public structure group have uncovered multiple construction phases...
(Re)Building the Present, (Re)Claiming the Past: Architecture and Social Memory at the Medieval Monastery of Psalmodi, Gard, France (2018)
This study employs archaeological and documentary evidence to examine adaptive reuse and social memory at the site of the medieval monastery of Psalmodi in Gard, France. During the late twelfth century, the abbey church was partially rebuilt, enclosing the footprint of an earlier church and maintaining early public space while transforming and enlarging monastic space. The reconstruction occurred shortly after a century of turmoil that saw the takeover of the monastery by a rival and the...
Remembering the Rancho: Insights into Social Memory at Rancho Kiuic, Yucatán, México (2018)
A legacy of oppression exists alongside the memory of agentive acts of residence among laborers and their descendants at the site of Rancho Kiuic, Yucatan, México. Owned and operated by several generations of Maya-speaking families from the Late Colonial through National periods, the Rancho offers a setting for exploring the responses to and experiences of the Caste War of Yucatán (1947-1901) and agrarian reform among communities outside of centralized population centers. Excavation data from...
Ritual Deposits at El Marquesillo, Veracruz: Examples of Long-Term Collective Social Memory (2016)
The settlement of El Marquesillo in Southern Veracruz was inhabited during the Mesoamerican Early Formative period, emerged as an Olmec center during the Middle Formative period, and remained occupied throughout the remainder of the pre-Columbian period. During the late Middle to early Late Formative period an Olmec monumental tabletop throne was ritually terminated and deposited. This interment was accompanied by two substantial offerings suggestive of a feasting event. More than a millennium...
The Role of Social Memory in Everyday Bodily Practices of Pottery Production and Consumption during the Late Moche Period (500 – 800 AD) on the North Coast of Peru (2017)
Often the term ‘social memory’ conjures up ideas of grand commemoration events such as statues, museums, large scale construction and other public displays to remember the collective past. We must not forget, however, the seemingly mundane daily practices that help to create, maintain, and change society while simultaneously forming social identities. This study looks at the Late Moche period (500 – 800 AD) on the North Coast of Peru. It was a time of immense social, religious, and political...
Ruins of the Past: The Use and Perception of Abandoned Structures in the Maya Lowlands (2008)
From the Preclassic to the present, Maya peoples have continuously built, altered, abandoned, and re-used structures, imbuing them with new meanings at each transformation. Ruins of the Past is the first volume to focus on how previously built structures in the Maya Lowlands were used and perceived by later peoples, exploring the topic through concepts of landscape, place, and memory. The collection, as Wendy Ashmore points out in her foreword, offers "a stimulating, productive, and fresh set of...
Social Memory and the Development of Monumental Architecture in the Southern Jequetepeque Valley, Peru (2017)
Numerous theoretical concepts associated with social memory have been employed by archaeologists working throughout the world as a means of explaining continuities and discontinuities in the archaeological record. These social memory-based approaches are varied and include specific avenues of inquiry such as how social memories were actively manipulated for political gain; the role played by monumental architecture in the coalescing of shared memories; and the interrelationship between social...
Social Memory and the Re-Use of Archaeological Ruins: Preliminary Insights from a Chimú-Inka Elite Gravesite at Samanco, Nepeña Valley, Peru ca. 1470-1534 CE (2017)
Social memory and ancestor veneration are recurring themes throughout Andean belief systems. Yet, the relationship between ancient Andeans and the archaeological ruins they encountered remains an underexplored research topic. Recent fieldwork at Samanco, an Early Horizon coastal settlement in the Nepeña Valley, shows intriguing mortuary practices of reutilizing site ruins as cemeteries. After an abandonment hiatus over several centuries, Samanco’s ruins of stone enclosures were reutilized as a...
Social Memory in Maya Hinterland Communities: Recent Excavations at San Lorenzo, Belize (2016)
During the Preclassic period in the Maya lowlands, public structures became the materializations of ideology and memory, functioning to add permanence and significance to the growing ritual landscape. Most Preclassic public ritual structures, however, are documented within formal ceremonial centers. Little is known about Preclassic public spaces within hinterland communities. Recent excavations at the Xunantunich hinterland site of San Lorenzo have uncovered a Preclassic round platform buried...
Stone and Bone: Examining Social Memory through Continuity and Discontinuity in the Mimbres Region (2016)
Groups in the past used social memory for various social negotiations, which can include maintaining and legitimizing power, access to resources, and monumental construction. But how is memory maintained, created or recreated in the daily practices of a group or groups going through social and material transitions? How does that translate to real social power? In this spirit, I explore the creation, inscription, and possible contestation of social memory in the Mimbres region of southwest New...