ontology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Evans.

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. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto. Octavio Esparza Olguín. Daniel Salazar Lama. Luz Evelia Campaña Valenzuela. Adriana Velázquez Morlet.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Palmar has garnered considerable attention from researchers, primarily due to its numerous carved monuments. In 1936, Sir Eric Thompson’s exploration initially reported 44 stelae and several altars at its Main Group. However, despite sporadic studies conducted by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and others in subsequent decades, systematic research was lacking,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Randee Fladeboe.

This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the ethical components of prehistoric macaw husbandry practices in the cultural areas of the US Southwest and Northern Mexico. Within many traditional Native American cosmological schemes, humans and animals occupy a shared social world with reciprocal responsibilities toward one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Barkai.

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. Animals played a major role in human subsistence, well-being, and relationship with the world around them since time immemorial. Humans were highly dependent on their animal counterparts for their successful survival and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aleksa Alaica. Luis Manuel Gonzalez La Rosa.

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. Moche artistic representations are known for their composite images of plants, animals, humans, and supernatural forms. The genesis of this artistic tradition rests in the beliefs about the relations between species, environments, and worlds. Food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Sobel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Our research in the Ozarks of southwest Missouri yields insights that are at odds with national and local perceptions of the area. Archaeological, documentary, and oral history data show that late 19th and early 20th century communities were more racially diverse and economies less narrowly agrarian than assumed and, arguably, than they are today. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teagan Knutson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the numerous funerary offerings associated with the interment of Lady K'abel, the Kaanul queen who ruled at the mid-sized Classic Maya city of Waka’, was a particularly large polychrome platter. Keith Eppich identified the platter as a Late Classic Palmar Orange polychrome and it features an array of motifs, including cormorants and circular objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Lawres. Matthew Colvin.

Recent research on Pre-Contact South Florida has reinforced the notion that the peoples dwelling in the region inhabited a past material world much different from our own and from neighboring areas. In particular, the hydrologic characteristics of a subtropical landscape centered on the Lake Okeechobee basin are one of the central features of both the epistemology and ontology reflected in the earliest monumental architecture in the region. Yet these worldviews and worlds were not static...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Lawres. Matthew Sanger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ontological Turn has become thoroughly entrenched in archaeological research, providing both new avenues of topical research as well as strong influences over the discipline as a whole. It has provided a needed shift to thinking outside the traditional archaeological box, taking many steps in the right direction. Yet, in the majority of cases,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Canoes were central to watercraft cultures in subsistence activities, in hauling people and loads, in travel and recreation, and in warfare and ceremonies. However, to many people on the Pacific Northwest Coast, canoes were viewed, understood, and experienced as much more than just...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although simple tags are liable to appear anywhere, contemporary graffiti thrives in places that are marginal to everyday traffic, such as alleyways, rooftops, overpasses and vacant or abandoned structures. Even in these places graffiti is usually impermanent; other writers will eventually go over it or the wall will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Thomas Emerson.

An early Mississippian world came about at and around Cahokia in the eleventh century CE owing to the convergences of people with other organisms, celestial objects, atmospheric conditions, landforms, and elements, each with their own distinctive temporalities and affects. Understanding those convergences historically entails grappling with timing and duration, and we offer a Bayesian reading of the latest radiocarbon datasets considered against the backdrop of the suspected periodicities of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ella Assaf Shpayer.

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. The deep bond between humans and horses is well reflected in the Paleolithic record from its earliest stages. The significant role of horses (Equus) in Paleolithic diet is evident from the presence of horse skeletal remains, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Burkett.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropology and archaeology strive not only to reconstruct the physical characteristics of the past world but to understand how past people thought about the world around them. The way people think gets encoded in magical frameworks in both physical objects like monuments and dwellings, as well as in less permanent expressions, like music,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Betts.

This is an abstract from the "Past Human-Shark Interactions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a previous article, Betts et al. (2012) explored the spiritual relationship between sharks and humans in the Atlantic Northeast. For peoples with relational ontologies, using, wearing, and trading shark teeth not only signaled a sacred relationship with the shark but also an identity embodied by this conspecific; namely, a way of life connected to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mairead Doery.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North American rock art researchers have long relied on stylistic conventions for identifying the age, cultural association, and, therefore, presumed “meaning” of petroglyphs and pictographs. These categories project archaeological lenses onto Indigenous iconography; when employed at rock art sites baring multiple iconographic “styles”, this approach...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dr. Kathryn Arthur.

This paper focuses on the relationship between material culture and living peoples as constructed through an African perspective of what it means to be in existence- ontology. It is critical that we precedent descendant theories of the human and nonhuman world to produce meaningful narratives of the past, to avoid alienation and ethnocentrism. The Borada-Gamo of southern Ethiopia offers that their worldview enlightens their knowledge of technology. Material culture as spiritually animated has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johi D. Griffin. Kathryn E Sampeck.

A crucial challenge in the public interpretation of Cherokee archaeology and cultural heritage is for Native community members to be able to inform the interpretation and presentation in every step of the process, from formulating research design, carrying out investigations, and the dissemination of the results. The emphasis in both formulating and interpreting cultural heritage work conducted by the authors is to use frameworks and approaches that start from Cherokee perspectives and goals....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whitney Cox.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the talk by Kim Cox, this talk will further detail the importance of the calendar systems preserved in the rock art and its solar interactions at Paint Rock in the Lower Pecos, Texas. By creating rock art panels that intersect with the natural landscape and continue to mark events in time with solar motion, the artists effectively instilled life...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur.

The Gamo, who live in the highlands on the edge of the southern Ethiopian rift valley, are known for their unique and beautiful household architecture. Tourists ogle their oval basket-like grass houses and peer inside for mere minutes hoping to observe some secret moment or practice previously unknown to them. Similarly many archaeologists long to feel beneath their trowels a widespread hard surface indicative of a house floor. We remove the tangible aspects of the home, bit by bit, hoping to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomos Ll Evans.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Late 19th century British colonial authorities in Lagos sought to extend imperial hegemony over the Yorùbá kingdoms to the north as part of ongoing efforts to control trade in the interior of what is now Nigeria. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cruz-Gil.

This is an abstract from the "(Re) Imagining Rock Art Research" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sierra de San Francisco cave paintings are a hard to access archaeological site in Mexico’s Baja California Sur state. Visiting some of the largest of them requires traversing a canyon on muleback, two nights of camping, and taxing hikes, as well as hiring guides and coordinating with the local National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Witt. Catherine Landis. Neil Patterson, Jr..

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological landscapes embody shifting conceptualizations of the individuals who live, work, and play at those locations, both in the past and present. While other papers in this session address such changes in the context of the archaeological past, we bring the discussion to the present. We explore these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madison Drew.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Shell bracelets are a prevalent form of bodily adornment throughout the North American Southwest, appearing as material culture in the Ancestral Pueblo, Hohokam, Casas Grandes, and Sinagua cultures. Though these ornaments typically appear as jewelry objects, they are also present within the ceramic iconography of the Classic Period (1000 – 1130 CE)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Maffie.

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. The Mexica tzompantli (“skull rack”) consisted of multiple, agricultural-style ordered rows of human skull-seeds. As such it constituted an enormous “battery pack,” or milpa, that contained, stored, and radiated the...