Indigenous (Other Keyword)
201-225 (243 Records)
Archaeologists rarely examine the reuse and reimagining of artifacts within contemporary Indigenous communities. The Pamunkey Indian Tribe, located in the Tidewater region of Virginia, has a long history of utilizing materials from the Reservation’s archaeological record in a variety of ways. For over a century, tribal members have reused artifacts in methods similar to their intended function, and they have reimagined them to create artwork and encourage artistic inspiration. Archaeology has...
Toward a Balanced Public History in the Ohio Country: Collaborative Interpretation of the Histories of the Shawnee Nations at Great Council State Park (2023)
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 Trackway Site: Human Footprints at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition in the Great Salt Lake Desert (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Application of Geophysical Techniques to Military Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2022, human footprints were discovered on the Old River Bed delta, a large terminal Pleistocene to early Holocene distributary wetland in western Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. The site also sits within the boundaries of the U.S. Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range. The prints’ preservation and context showed the...
Trans-species Archaeologies and Ritual Bone Deposits: Respecting the Animal Ancestral Dead (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although created by people, marine mammal bone (e.g., whale, seal, dugong) ritual installations on land and in the sea are also expressions of marine mammal agency given that the sites are materializations of a social and moral...
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...
Two Examples of Recent O’odham Participation in Archaeological Projects in Southwestern Arizona (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The application of archaeological strategies in conjunction with traditional knowledge has produced unprecedented results from recent projects conducted in southwestern Arizona and northwestern Sonora, Mexico. The Hia C-ed O’odham have occupied this area since at least AD...
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...
“United with Them in Good Feeling and Friendship”? Material Insights into 17th century Onöndowa'ga:' Hodinöhsö:ni' Incorporations (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca) Hodinöhsö:ni' (Six Nations Iroquois) communities in what we now call New York State incorporated a number of other Indigenous peoples, both individuals and large groups, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Other settler scholars have interpreted the status of these incorporees as akin to enslavement—particularly for the Wendat...
Unraveling Indigenous Histories in the Upper Itajai Valley (Santa Catarina State, Brazil): Insights from Archaeological Research at the Tobias Wagner Site (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper Itajai Valley, nestled within Santa Catarina, Brazil, has stood as the enduring homeland of the Laklãnõ-Xokleng people for centuries—a testament to their remarkable resilience despite persistent struggles for land and social rights. Against this backdrop, we present new archaeological findings from the Tobias Wagner site, which comprises 18...
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...
The Upland Agricultural Revolution of the Fourteenth Century (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper reports preliminary results from intensive surface mapping and test excavations of precolonial agricultural systems at Picuris Pueblo. Our work alongside collaborators from Picuris has uncovered one of the largest continuous agricultural systems in the northern Rio Grande region. After five field seasons of mapping...
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...