ontology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Benfer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Living hundreds of years, ceiba trees (Ceiba pentandra) have long functioned as monuments to ancestral spirits, cosmological order, and chiefly authority among Indigenous populations throughout Central America. While these giant trees are often cosmologically charged and considered sacred or divine, there is substantial variety within Indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvia Tomaskova.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Sayre. Nicco La Mattina.

The ontological turn in Anthropology has revealed new possibilities for considering the relationships between humans, material things, and “other-than-human persons,” as well as reassessing the Western notion of a nature/culture dichotomy. One site where these insights have begun to be applied is Chavín de Huantár in Peru. The iconography of the site is well known for its mixed human/animal hybrids, a style that prompted John Rowe to consider the art figuratively as visual kennings, with certain...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Radoslaw Palonka.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Castle Rock settlement community dated to the 13th century AD located in Sand Canyon and Rock Creek Canyon in the Canyons of the Ancient National Monument, in southwestern Colorado, has been investigated since 2011, among other things focusing on the studies of relations between settlement, rock art, and landscape. In 2023, basing on a few tips from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angelina Locker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migrations are a key feature of human populations past and present, and people moved across landscapes regardless of cultural affiliation, hierarchical structures, or place of birth. But, what does it mean when individuals and/or pieces of their remains are moved elsewhere posthumously? This paper builds upon discourse centered around social memory and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Henry Tantaleán.

In the last decade a number of studies have been published focusing on the way Andean peoples both in the past and present, describe and define their world and its relational elements. These ontologies are derived from anthropology, ethnohistory and ethnography. Most of them intend to reconstruct the worldview of these social groups with different results. In this paper I summarize the main trends related to ontologies developed for Andean societies, especially those used to explain pre-Hispanic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Burch Joosten. John Warner. Giles Morrow.

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The phenomenon of place as it is rhythmically embodied, akin to a fabric that is collectively worn and interwoven over successive generations, unfolds at the center of our presentation. We explore the intricate meshwork of place-making, applying an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ahmad Mohammadpour.

This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a discipline initially tasked with understanding non-Western histories and heritage, archaeology has functioned mainly as a technology of forgetting rather than remembering when it came to indigenous material cultures. The role of archaeology in colonizing African and South American cultures is widely explored,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Yam.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Architecture made up an important part of the built environment of Albert Porter Pueblo (5MT123), an ancestral village in southwestern Colorado and most intensively occupied during Pueblo II–Pueblo III (950–1300 CE). In my study, I conduct spatial-syntax analyses of collective belongings and individual belongings, or proxies for past activities in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agustina Vazquez Fiorani. Ian Kuijt. Meredith Chesson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive archaeological research, surprisingly little is known about regional and interregional mortuary practices in the Southern Andes, specifically in Northwestern Argentina. Large-scale excavation carried out in El Cadillal, undertaken between 1971 and 1972, resulted in the recovery of 44 prehispanic burials associated with Candelaria dated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Vail. Maia Dedrick.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her article “Saving the Other Bees,” Eve Bratman (2020) explores the successful reintroduction of beekeeping practices associated with the stingless species Melipona beecheii in the Yucatán Peninsula, which has resulted in the species thriving following near extinction. She...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watts.

Seventeenth century accounts of Huron-Wendat life, like those of myriad other Eastern Woodlands groups, underscore a relational ontology wherein the media which separate humans from non-humans, as well as the organic from the inorganic, is principally porous and naturally given to communion. These same accounts, however, also suggest that the Huron-Wendat possessed an intricate soul schema that, while variegated and capable of metamorphosis, was nonetheless primary and essentialist in nature. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Zedeño.

Euroamericans who encountered northern Plains bison hunters in the late 19th century believed that the Blackfoot held the Rocky Mountains in awe and fear, preferring to remain on the plains even as bison and elk herds dwindled. This incorrect assumption has hampered our ability to understand deep-time relationships between mountain and plains cultural expressions. Although the historic Blackfoot did not dwell in high elevations, the character of their relationship with the Rocky Mountain Front...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Schaefer.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent advances in 3D modeling have allowed archaeologists to explore cave art sites as dynamic spaces where perception and physical experience played active roles in the formation of said artwork. In the American Southeast, where caves were and still are seen by many Indigenous peoples as portals to another spiritual world, 3D reconstructions have much...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kisha Supernant.

The Métis Nation of Canada has often been categorized as a mixed, hybrid ethnic group, based largely on racialized understandings of the early encounters between Indigenous women and European men. Métis scholars have begun to critique the racial basis for "Métis-as-mixed" and shift toward ways of identifying based on personhood and nationhood. In this paper, I discuss how settler colonial categories of hybridity have influenced past archaeological research on the Métis in Canada and explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Mina.

This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves often occupied prominent locations as visible landmarks or as nodal points in exchange networks and mobility routes. The paper discusses coastal sacred caves, which through the transportation of diverse material culture, provided the backdrop where maritime identities were played out. The study investigates the Late Minoan occupation phase of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justyna Olko.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nahuatl, often referred to as the “Aztec language,” is one of the languages most widely identified, both in the academy and in public awareness, with prehispanic cultures. In archaeological and historical research, it often receives the name...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Ortiz Brito. Arlina Morales Guillen. Daira Hernandez Bellido.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the results of the Proyecto Arqueologico Nestepe-Rancho Cobata conducted in the municipality of Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz. The project explores the role of Olmec sculptures in the development and contestation of social memory in Tres Zapotes and its hinterland, during the Epi-Olmec period. Previous research carried out in the area show...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sheets.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Pueblo Southwest, ethnographies documenting Indigenous-animal interactions have been used to derive sets of expectations about how Ancestral Pueblo-animals relationships may have appeared in the past. This literature has primarily been used to predict the roles (e.g., subsistence, ritual) and depositional contexts (e.g., structure type) of animals...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying a relational ontological approach to faunal bones I identify animals, secondary animal by-products, and faunal artifacts as persons—in the corporal animal forms of puma, eagle, wolf, and rattlesnake—whom actively engaged with entangled sociopolitical communities of humans....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of sedentary and socio-politically complex societies represents a fundamental transformation in Mesoamerica. At the highland site of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, recent excavations have explored later Early Formative (1400 -1000 cal BCE) public space, a ballcourt, recovering a large assemblage of macrobotanical, faunal,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Lee Dawdy.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Meat: Animal-Human Relations in New Orleans and Louisiana", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During excavations in the garden behind New Orleans’ St. Louis Cathedral in 2008 and 2009, we unexpectedly found the carefully buried remains of a domestic cat and a pet dog in contexts dating from the early and mid 20th century. Such burials are consistent with a wider practice of smuggling pets into sacred...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erica Hill.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Inuit and Yupiit living on the coasts and islands of the North Pacific inhabited a landscape populated by spirits, animal persons, and object-beings. Human observance of rules and rituals was necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate this fluid, animated ecosystem. Magical practices, deeply embedded in relational ontologies,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Simeonoff. Samantha Fladd.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists view deposition as existing at an interesting crossroads: it is both fundamental to our basic understandings of site formation and easy to dismiss as unintentional or of secondary importance. Detailed discussions occur most frequently either to explain away issues with the archaeological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erick Acero-Shapiama. John Rick. Rosa Rick. Lisseth Rojas-Pelayo.

This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A través del tiempo, la Plaza Circular y su atrio en el monumento Chavín de Huántar han tenido mucha importancia. Durante la fase Blanco - Negro, estas áreas, tuvieron pleno funcionamiento y albergaron una diversidad de contextos, donde destaca el descubrimiento de las galerías de la...