Communities of Practice (Other Keyword)
26-50 (125 Records)
The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...
Compositional and Stylistic Analysis of Texcoco-Molded Censers and Molds from the Gulf Lowland Frontier of the Aztec Empire (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 20 years a growing assemblage of Aztec-style ceramics, specifically Texcoco Molded censers and molds, has been recovered from sites throughout the northeastern Tochtepec province of the Triple Alliance Empire. In this presentation, we examine the chemical compositions using pXRF, paste recipes, and decorative attributes and...
Compositional and Technological Analysis of Panamanian Colonial Utilitarian Wares (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Panama, as in other regions of the Caribbean and Latin America, several archaeologists have reported the presence of colonial utilitarian wares, also known as Colono-Indian ware, creole ware, and coarse hand-made earthenware. Previous research on this ware focuses on refining the typologies and identifying traits that could be related to African, Spanish,...
Constructing Communities: A New Magnetometry Survey at the John Chapman Site (2018)
The John Chapman site is a mounded village that lies along the Apple River in northwestern Illinois. At approximately A.D. 1050, it appears that Mississippian migrants traveled to the area and interacted with the Late Woodland people already occupying the land. Previous excavations in the northern portion of the site revealed John Chapman people changing their ceramics to emulate Mississippian styles, while keeping their houses Late Woodland-like. Recent magnetometry surveys targeted central and...
Constructing Technical Identity among Past and Present Potters’ Communities in the Talina Valley, Southern Bolivia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic studies, particularly those based on ethnographic data, have demonstrated the relationship between technological choices and identity construction. However, this crossover can be challenging as identity is generally self-defined. This relationship is only possible if we understand technology as a social phenomenon...
Consumerism on the Margins: Shop Ledgers and Materialized Social Status in Coastal Co. Galway, Ireland. (2016)
In contrast to the marginality ascribed to Western Ireland during the 19th and 20th centuries, islanders’ and coastal mainlanders’ participated in transnational trade networks expressed through everyday material decision-making, seasonal and intermittent international interactions, and ideologies of social status. Historically, coastal communities in Western Ireland have been characterized as marginalized and geographically isolated from participation in mainstream consumerism and national and...
Consuming Community: Cuisine, Community, and Resilience in Late Colonial New Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Culinary Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Communities of practice are negotiated daily through the use of cuisine. In colonial settings, these communities are contested and reformed, as colonists and colonized negotiate their new found roles. Following the abandonment of the first New Mexican colony after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the Spanish Crown recolonized New Mexico in 1692. This second New Mexican...
Convergence of Tears at Momonga: Spiritual, Social and Personal Interactions of the Multiethnic Mourning Ceremony (2018)
The village of Momonga (Ca-LAn-357) is located in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, along the pre-Columbian boundaries of multiple ethnic groups. Rock art in the area indicates ritual activities involving people from various cultural traditions, including ancestral Chumash, Tongva, Yokuts, and Tataviam peoples. Excavations in a portion of the site have produced exchange and utilitarian items, such as shell beads, stone beads, amulets, stone bowls, hammer stones, pressure flakes,...
Crafting Continuity, Crafting Change: A Compositional Approach to Communities of Practice in the Moquegua Valley, Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many regions of the south central Andes, the transition from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate period was accompanied by significant disruption to regional sociopolitical and economic systems, including the organization of craft...
(Cross-)Boundary Objects as Imperial Agents: Imagined Communities in the Late Precolumbian Andes (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper builds out from the community of practice literature, inflecting it with more emphasis on the agency of objects as active members of such constituencies, and expanding, as well, on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities. In it, I aim to...
Cultivation and Herding Practices, Fiber Colors and Textile Styles in the Paracas-Nasca Transition (2018)
Improving documentation of artifact assemblages in the funerary contexts of the Necropolis of Wari Kayan (Paracas site, south coast of the Central Andes) leads to identification of multiple contemporary textile styles as well as their transformation over the period of cemetery use (c. 250 BCE to 250 CE). While artifact variability in the region has largely been organized in hypothetical phases, expanded data on garment design and production details, as well as imagery, is most usefully organized...
DEBS: Using Digital Tools in Community-Led Graveyard Recording (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (www.debs.ac.uk) is an Historic England-funded project based at the Archaeology Data Service and Digital Creativity Labs in the University of York, UK. We are collaborating with community groups to develop new tools and resources for burial space research, recording...
Decolonizing Archaeology: Learning from Indigenous Land and Water Epistemology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Congress: Multivocal Conversations Furthering the World Archaeological Congress Agenda" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ongoing colonization of the environment and natural resources has negatively impacted environmental heritage rights in many parts of the world, particularly Indigenous environmental rights and their relationships with the environment. For many Indigenous communities, the history of...
Decolonizing Latin American Archaeology: “Affective Alliances” with Communities of Practice (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Communities of practice are currently the majority of places in Latin America. They include Indigenous people, “quilombolas,” and their descendants with European and Asian people, living predominantly outside the cities, in the most diverse places, such as the agroforestry communities. Decolonized archaeology has an enormous challenge ahead of it, both in...
Depositional Practice and Ancestral Presence at Edye Point (2015)
On the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, between 400–1500 calA.D., the Straits Salish peoples built distinctive funerary petroforms for their ancestral dead. These above ground features, constructed in a patterned array of sizes and shapes, were the material and spatial outcome of ritualized depositional practices. The Edye Point Cemetery, the largest funerary petroform cemetery in the region, has more than 300 of these features concentrated in a three hectare area. There is a recursive and...
Digital Archaeology Mentorship: Best Practices in a Rapidly Changing Field (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Capacity Building or Community Making? Training and Transitions in Digital Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Digital archaeology comprises everything from obtaining digital data, to data analysis, representation, and preservation. It is a complex field that is in constant flux, due to the ever changing landscape of available commercial, home grown and open access resources. Training and mentorship are of...
Diné łe’saa łitsxo bik'ah dash chá’ii dajíi la: Navajo Gobernador Polychrome Pottery (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Nat’aah Nahane’ Bina’ji O’hoo’ah: Diné Archaeologists & Navajo Archaeology in the 21st Century" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gobernador Polychrome is a Navajo ceramic practice whose development was hastened by participation in the Pueblo Revolt. It represents a visible change in Navajo ceramic technology and a window into their social history. My discussions, in this paper are not aligned with Navajo...
A Dynamic Past: The Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project (2018)
The collaborative, American-Hungarian Prehistoric Interactions on the Plain Project explores the past through the reconstruction of interactions. Investigations on interactions as an active mode of social investment and social construction challenges normative concepts of "culture" by modeling socio-cultural boundaries as a dynamic and negotiated process, as opposed to a static categorically assigned social unit. Moreover, our research contextualizes regional developments as the result of...
Establishing Mississippian Potting Communities at the Wickliffe Mounds Site, Kentucky (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pottery vessels at the Wickliffe Mounds site, a Mississippian village located in Ballard County, Kentucky, can be used as a representative sample to examine the ceramic production techniques and choices used within the Ohio-Mississippi River confluence region. This paper uses both visual and quantitative...
Examining Small-scale Variations within Late Mississippian Complicated Stamped Pottery from St. Catherines Island, GA (2017)
Late Mississippian (AD 1300-1580) ceramic typologies on the Georgia coast broadly group pottery based on 1) temper (coarse grit) and 2) surface decoration (incising, stamping, and rim decoration). Recently, Late Archaic and Mission period pottery studies focused on small-scale ceramic variations, which reflect micro-styles, were successful in identifying patterns related to past pottery communities of practice. Using a similar approach, I present data on three Late Mississippian village ceramic...
Exploring the Engagement, Imagination, and Alignment of Potters and their Practices in Neolithic S. Calabria, Italy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation we use the results of a raw materials survey, replicative experiments in the field and the laboratory, and physicochemical and mineralogical analyses of local geological clays and archaeological ceramics from the sites of Umbro Neolithic and Penitenzeria in Southern Calabria, Italy to ask 3...
Exploring the Interaction of Culture and Technology in the Acoma Culture Province (2018)
The Acoma Culture Province is the geographic expanse of the ancestral homeland of the Pueblo of Acoma documented for adjudication through the Indian Claims Commission and through archaeological research. Pottery made during both the prehistoric and historic periods found within the Acoma Culture Province was made using crushed potsherds as an addition to the pottery clay. The practice of adding crushed potsherds represents a cultural choice for Acoma potters, a choice that has considerable...
Fashions and Fabrications of the Fanciest Footwear: Two Millennia of Stability and Change in Twined Sandal Use in the US Southwest (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Archaeological Footwear" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twined sandals were the most long-lived yucca-cordage sandals used by Ancestral Pueblo people in the US Southwest, bridging the Basketmaker II (100 BC–AD 550) through Pueblo III (AD 1150–1300) periods. They were among the most technologically complex, ornate, and resource-intensive textiles ever produced in the region and also a key feature of...
Fingerprints of Community: Decolonizing Archaeological Data Analysis through Networks (2018)
This paper uses the Nexus 1492 database, built over approximately 30 years of fieldwork, to examine ceramic attribute variability throughout the Antillean Islands. Regional ceramic analyses often focus on the construction of ceramic typologies that are then used to compare typological proportions, differences, and similarities at various spatial resolutions across temporal periods. Long-standing critiques of the use of typologies and taxonomies in archaeology (sensu Brew 1946; Gnecco and...
Formative Communities of Practice and Disjunctures in Southern Gulf Lowland Interaction with Central Mexico (2018)
Recently Stoner and Pool called for an "Archaeology of Disjuncture" to refocus attention on variation in intra- and interregional interaction, illustrating the approach with the case of the Classic period of the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz. In this paper I extend application of the disjunctive approach into the Formative Period of the southern Gulf lowlands, focusing primarily on interactions with Central Mexico, and incorporating a Communities of Practice perspective on the formation...