Indigenous (Other Keyword)
1-25 (341 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper seeks to interpret the spatial patterning of the Swan Point Locus 2 site, interpreted to be a seasonal residential site. The site, located on a hill overlooking a small northern tributary of the Tanana River, consists of several features in excellent preservation. The assemblage suggests a pattern of features and artifacts consistent with a...
“An Acre of Land to Plant or A Stick of Wood to Make a Fence or Fire”: A Heritage of Mohegan Allotment (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Activating Heritage: Encouraging Substantive Practices for a Just Future" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Allotment was a world-changing institution that forever altered the course of North American history; through this process, Indigenous lands were broken up into lots, “owned” by individuals and families rather than collectively held. Allotment placed an unprecedented amount of stress on Indigenous traditions of...
Acrobatic Games of Mesoamerica (2015)
In this paper I examine the context and performance of acrobatic games in Mesoamerica using archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic representations of contorsionists, tightrope walkers, equilibrists, dancers on stilts, jugglers, and participants in rotational devices, like the Palo Volador and the Huahua. I underline the importance of acrobatic games in ritual festivities and secular events where improvisational and professional performers staged spectacles and played tricks designed...
Addressing Neglected Narratives Through The Maritime Cultural Landscape Of Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission/Burgiyana, South Australia (2016)
This paper presents results of research based upon an oral history, archaeological and archival case study of the maritime activities at Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission/Burgiyana in South Australia—the traditional land of the Narungga people. Point Pearce was established in 1868 and has been self-managed by the community since 1966, forming the historical time period for this study; however the research also draws on pre-contact knowledges. This case study was used to assess whether the maritime...
Addressing Tribal Environmental Justice and Historic Preservation for Levee Infrastructure through Value-Added Geospatial Risk Analysis (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study focuses on concerns for levees that tribal, state, and federal historic preservation staff have anecdotally observed, but have not fully quantified. It was designed in direct response Tribal Historic Preservation Officers’ concerns following flood events in the Mississippi River Valley in 2019. The research design was developed in coordination...
All in a Day's Work? South African Rock Engravings as Bodily Practice and Skill. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study of rock engravings at Wildebeest Kuil, South Africa focuses on bodies, strength, skills and practice necessary to produce the carved images. Rather than ask "what do these images mean?", the project examines the material evidence for labor, effort, skill, strength and repetitive action that would have been only possible through extended...
Ancient DNA from Campeche, Mexico, Reveals a Socially Segregated Population in the First Two Centuries after Hispanic Contact (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonial period in Mexico was an unprecedented time when previously disparate populations began living together under Hispanic leadership and Catholic faith, often unwillingly. Immediately after the conquest, Spanish colonists established urban strongholds, often bringing African slaves and servants with them. In these...
Ancient Maya Dentistry: New Evidence for Therapeutic Dental Interventions and Dental Care Practices (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya are often highly regarded for their skill in dentistry—evidenced by longstanding traditions of filing and inlaying teeth. These procedures had a considerable success rate suggesting a pervasive knowledge of dental anatomy among practitioners. However, this study of aesthetic practices has...
Andean Indigenous Bodies: Methodological Approaches to Past Perceptions of the Body (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any attempt to understand indigenous anatomy and perceptions of the body from an emic perspective in the Andes is a challenging endeavor, beginning with basic definitions that differ substantially from Western traditions. Furthermore, definitions changed across space and time throughout Andean...
[Animal] Skeletons in the Closet: Decolonizing Comparative Faunal Collections (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Reckoning with Legacy Exhibits, Data, and Collections" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Northern Arizona University, Department of Anthropology, Faunal Analysis Laboratory (NAUDAFAL) prioritizes decolonizing zooarchaeology through our work. Despite this mission, the lab’s comparative collection is stored and organized in alignment with arbitrary Euro-Western epistemologies and lacks Indigenous perspectives for...
Anna and the Sea: Reflections on Anna Kerttula's Influence on a Generation of North Pacific Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in Alaska and the broader North Pacific Rim has revealed a long and complex history of human occupation, dynamic human-environmental interactions, and – above all - underscores the relevance of archaeology to people living across the region today. These developments span the nearly two decades of Dr....
Another Indigenous Feminist on Settler Colonialism in Archaeology (2018)
This paper addresses the ongoing phenomenon of settler colonialism that permeates even the best intentioned "decolonizing" efforts. This paper gives the same credence to Indigenous and non-Western laws, stories, and epistemologies; practices what Sara Ahmed (2014) calls "citational rebellion;" and putts substantial weight into the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in order to argue that when white archaeologists capitalize on Indigenous, Black, or People of Colour’s (BIPOC) things, bodies,...
Anticipating Community: Slow Bioarchaeology in Legacy Anatomical Collections (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Engagement: Incorporating Deep Time and Slow Science into Community Based Research Projects" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent publications outlining ethical guidelines for the handling of human skeletal remains stress the necessity of obtaining informed consent from donors, lineal descendants, descendant communities, and/or communities of care before conducting research. However, when consent...
Applying Indigenous Methodologies to Create an Indigenous Research Agenda Model (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous methodologies are methods of research that are guided by Indigenous knowledge systems and worldviews. Indigenous methodologies include: (1) doing research for, by or with indigenous communities, (2) incorporating indigenous worldviews, (3) incorporating traditional knowledge, (4) incorporating tribal ethics & protocols, (5) applying decolonizing...
Applying Slow Science and the Ethics of Community Engagement: An Eastern Woodland case study of indigenous incorporation with the acquisition of archaeological knowledge (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Engagement: Incorporating Deep Time and Slow Science into Community Based Research Projects" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation explores the implementation of the ‘slow science’ method, termed to incorporate meaningful indigenous community involvement into archaeological research. Recent initiatives involving descendant indigenous communities through land acknowledgement and explanatory...
Archaeobotanical Evidence Supports Indigenous Cucurbit Long-Term Use in the Mesoamerican Neotropics (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The squash family contains some of the most important crops cultivated worldwide. Squashes were among the first cultivated crop species, but little is known about how their domestication unfolded. We employ direct radiocarbon dating and morphological analyses of desiccated cucurbit remains from El Gigante Rockshelter, Honduras to reconstruct human...
Archaeology & Community Engagement at Mission Espada, San Antonio TX. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the findings from two seasons of fieldwork at Mission Espada in San Antonio as well as preliminary results from comparative analysis of the living quarters of the priests and Indigenous living quarters at the mission in the 18th century. This comparison is part of a larger multiscalar project that examines the lived experiences of...
Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Western Papaguería: Let's Not Forget the People (2018)
The O’odham and other tribes of southern Arizona and northern Sonora have occupied the Western Papaguería since time immemorial. This dry and desolate corner of the Sonoran Desert is home to rich histories and living traditions that have left their subtle marks on the land, and that archaeologists have continuously tried to identify, describe, and interpret. For too long, ethnographic and ethnohistoric records from this region have run in parallel to the archaeology; however several recent...
Archaeology and Networks of Solidarity in Brazil and Ecuador: Women, Human Rights, and Sovereignty (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will reflect on the interactions and networks of solidarity among Indigenous, Afro-descendant women and beyond to capture the dynamics of collaboration in the face of different forms of violence worldwide. Social movements have demonstrated the determination of women to preserve their knowledge, resisting ongoing oppressions aimed at disrupting...
An Archaeology of Hope: How the Past Informs Indigenous Futures in the Southern Amazon’s “Arc of Deforestation" (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two decades of relentless agropastoral development has reduced the closed tropical forests to small patches in most of northern Mato Grosso, within the so-called “arc of deforestation” along the southern margins of the Amazon’s closed tropical forests. There are larger blocks in two...
The Archaeology of Indigenous-European Interaction at LaSoye 2, Dominica, a Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Trading Settlement (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, storm surges from Hurricane Maria exposed evidence of an early European colonial settlement on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Subsequent survey and testing established the site as a trading settlement, dating from the sixteenth until eighteenth century, a period of dynamic change in the Caribbean. The site is located on the coastline of an...
Archaeology of Sixteenth-Century Spanish Colonial Expeditions in the North American Southeast: Countering the Popular Narrative (2025)
This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the middle of the sixteenth century, the North American Southeast witnessed several large, well-funded Spanish colonial incursions. Recent archaeological research in the Black Prairie of Alabama is within the zone of convergence of two such expeditions, those of Hernando de Soto (1540-41) and Tristán de Luna...
Archaeology of the Past, Present, and Future: Insights From Youth Engagement in Old Harbor, Alaska (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This past summer, we traveled to Kodiak, Alaska to conduct archaeological fieldwork as part of the Old Harbor Archaeological History Project (OHAHP). This year, OHAHP partnered with Old Harbor community organizations to co-facilitate a cultural camp for local Indigenous youth. Serving as counselors, we aimed to expose Indigenous youth to archaeology by...
Archival Oral Histories, Intellectual Property, and the Indigenous Community: The Legacy of Mary Kiona, “Grand Matriarch” of the Upper Cowlitz (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archival collections of Native language oral histories are widely scattered among universities, museums, and tribal repositories throughout the Pacific Northwest region. Many of these oral histories are an important primary source of information relative to traditional Indigenous land-use practices, in turn critical to an understanding of the...
Archival Silence, Archaeological Fluency: Finding Indigenous Slavery In The Chesapeake (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeological Imaginaries, Regional Realities: 50 Years of Work in the Chesapeake", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The capture, enslavement, and sale of Indigenous people emerged early in the colonized Chesapeake Tidewater but remains understudied by archaeologists, in part because researchers have traditionally considered Indigenous enslavement as rare in the region. I use a fragmentary archive,...