ontology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

The use of “relational” approaches in archaeology seems much more prevalent in some contexts as compared to others. Particularly, it is most often invoked with respect to prehistoric hunter-foragers – that is, societies that are “politically non-complex” to use the classic archaeological terms. Perhaps as a result, violence is seldom discussed in the literature on relationality, unless to point out the contrasting violence of modernity itself. Yet for those of us who deal with indigenous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Catanach. Mark R. Agostini.

This paper recognizes the collaborative potential between American Indian Studies and an emerging landscape archaeology in furthering interdisciplinary studies of the American Southwest. Here the authors call for the continued reinterpretation of ancestral and contemporary Tewa sites by employing Native ontological and decolonized historical approaches to archaeological and ethnographic contexts situated in the backdrop of a larger and active cultural landscape. Such methods offer nuanced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Lawres.

The Belle Glade monumental landscape exhibits a high level of monumentality, with architectural features ranging from large circular ditches to massive geometric arrays of earthen architecture. However, this unique architecture has seen few archaeological interpretations. Those that have been put forth have largely emphasized economic explanations, many of which have been refuted with the acquisition of new archaeological data. Additionally, recent ecological studies show that the physical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Holly O'Neil. Mark Collard. Sabrina Higgins.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of the Cognitive Science of Religion has proposed that the in-group cooperation needed for the development of the large, complex human societies that first appeared during the Holocene was fostered by belief in the existence of supernatural beings that monitor humans and punish misbehavior. Two competing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Zariñán.

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. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Nissen.

This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper traces histories of reused stone and space at ancient Maya cities. Space/Place theorists have documented the ways that physical spaces have layers of meaning tied to their history of use. In the Maya area, archaeologists have documented myriad ways in which Maya individuals have engaged with and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Konwest. Marijke Stoll.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What role do ruins play in the lives of descendant peoples? Surrounding the small mountain pueblo of San Antonio La Baeza are numerous ruins dating to different time periods. For example, below the modern pueblo are large, deep rockshelters that have been occupied from the Late Formative up until today and are covered in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elliot Helmer.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social network analyses in archaeology have been successfully used to examine the connections between diverse social actors in the past. These studies have largely focused on the relationships between humans and other humans, typically using cultural materials as proxies for people....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cayla Colclasure. Zoe Schwandt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, authors Cayla Colclasure (she/her) and Zoe Schwandt (they/she) consider the phenomenon of paranormal tourism and related media as one way various publics engage with historic sites of confinement in the American South and attempt to bridge the epistemological divide between these forms of engagement with the past and the discipline of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Naoko Matsumoto. Atsushi Iriki. Saburo Sugiyama.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient consciousness may be a key concept to discern human biocultural evolutionary processes. We reassess how indigenous people out of Eurasia developed consciousness about time and space and created conceptual dividing apparatuses, like calendar systems. We begin with theoretical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Laguens. Benjamin Alberti.

Past ontologies of Andean worlds have been reconstructed in relation to archaeological landscapes, objects, and contexts. Relational and animated worlds build on Andean concepts such as Apu, wa’ka, and Pacha, as well as Amazonian theories. In our case, we work with Amazonian perspectivism as a broad-based Amerindian ontology to analyze a case from Andean northwest Argentina. Perspectivism provides us with a radically different ontological premise for the world: things do not need to be animated,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine G. Parker.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whiteness has been an especially salient phenomenon in shaping the histories, identities, and landscapes of the US Southeast, even as social and political rhetoric have long worked to render Whiteness invisible and implicit. However, explicit archaeological examinations of Whiteness have been comparatively limited within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian McNiven.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Arthur.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do we identify the transfer of technological knowledge on the local scale and how it might change through time and in regional contexts? The Gamo of southern Ethiopia offer that their Indigenous way of knowing the world enlightens understanding of transformations in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendoza.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copalli (copal) is an aromatic tree resin and a central figure in Mesoamerican ceremonies. Produced from various species of the Bursera genus, copalli is understood as the blood of trees and can be molded into figures or burned into thick...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phil Geib. Laurie Webster.

This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-pottery farmers on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers fabricated various artifacts using human hair cordage. The textiles made of this material ranged from intimate personal adornments to utilitarian rabbit nets and load-bearing tumplines. Aside from important functional properties of elasticity and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lake.

In 1972 David Clarke argued that "models are pieces of machinery that relate observations to theoretical ideas." That "machinery" does not have to be computational, or even quantitative, but with the resurgence of interest in simulation, the adoption of methods from evolutionary biology and the development of more sophisticated spatial statistics, it is increasingly both. Many of the papers in this session are case studies that explore exactly the issue of how effectively we can use models to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Ruuska.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the critical subject of indigenous oral traditions in California and the Great Basin. Using an interdisciplinary approach that considers Numic oral teachings relative to place-based data in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and geology, the author interrogates traditional narratives encoding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeleine Fyles.

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. Wooden posts have been a critical element of Andean architecture within the Jequetepeque valley on the north coast of Peru, particularly in the Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD 650–850). However, wooden posts have frequently been interpreted in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yifan Wang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interactions among organisms along with environmental factors in non-Western cultures, require to be re-examined since Western humanity-nature binary explanations fail to take into account indigenous ontologies. In the title, I prioritize environment among these three objects because I want to demonstrate that it is a prerequisite, helping shape the...