Communities of Practice (Other Keyword)
76-100 (125 Records)
By A.D. 1120 in the Black Warrior Valley of west-central Alabama, a Mississippian identity, predicated on the dissemination and subsequent adoption of maize, had firmly begun to take root at what would become the ritual-ceremonial center of Moundville. Traditionally, researchers have modelled the origins of Moundville within a political-economic lens: the growing aspirations of elites, who are implied to be male, are supported and fueled by stores of and feasts of maize, which is treated...
Mobilities of Potters and Pot Painters in Ancient Mediterranean: The Test Cases of Classical Athens and Southern Italy (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movements of artists and artisans was a common phenomenon in Eastern Mediterranean both in prehistoric and historical times, with sculptors and wall painters being the most frequently mentioned in ancient texts. The mobility of makers of figured ceramics in Classical Athens and in Southern Italy has often been posited based on stylistic affinities, but not...
Morphometric Analysis and the Investigation of Communities of Stone Toolmakers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will explore the usefulness of morphometric analysis when investigating how communities of stone toolmakers are embedded in and help construct their social landscape. Utilizing the concept of communities of practice, I intend to examine the culturally and historically situated nature of stone toolmakers through the analysis of their products....
Mounds, Mounding, and Polychrome Pottery in the Late Prehispanic Tonto Basin (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Both platform mounds and Roosevelt Red Ware (or Salado Polychrome) pottery have been interpreted as tied to religious practice in the late prehispanic southern Southwest, although the relationship between the two traditions is still debated. In the mid-14th-century (Gila phase) Tonto Basin, settlement included not...
My Grandfather’s Castanhal: Plants, Community, Territory, and Memory in the Brazilian Amazon (2018)
In contemporary Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, life is largely shaped by movement of, and among, plants. Plants here are mobile, but spend most of their lives stationary. In this paper, I examine the relationship between people and plants – as living, but nonetheless spatially rooted elements of the landscape – in these agroextractivist communities. I explore the significance of planting and plant life in regulating territorial use and notions of rights, access, and...
Navigating the Daily Lives in Plazuela Groups: Early Excavations in the López Plaza at the Classic Period Maya Site of El Palmar, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data presented in this paper are results from the 2022 field season at the López Plaza, a small plazuela group located within the site center of El Palmar. Fieldwork included test pit excavations, shovel test pits, and geophysical prospections. Lidar images show that the López Plaza has two separate plaza spaces and approximately eight structures and...
Neanderthal Communities of Care: How & Why Did Non-modern Hominins Care for Victims of Interpersonal Violence? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Systems of Care in Times of Violence" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the constantly evolving field of human origins, researchers are looking for new methods and theories to infer behavior from the paleoanthropological record. Here, Shanidar 3, a Neanderthal specimen with evidence of partially healed sharp force trauma, is examined using the Bioarchaeology of Care approach. Based on a comparison with...
Networks of Embodied Practice: Personhood, the Body, and Potting Skill in the North American Southeast (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. Archaeologists over the last two decades have become increasingly interested in the relationship between personhood and the human body. Bodily engagement with the material world can create and reproduce different kinds of social understandings, and is a means by which persons make subjectivity durable,...
No Hearth, No Problem: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of Ceremonial Architecture at Two Late Preceramic Sites in the Norte Chico Region (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Illuminated Communities: The Role of the Hearth at the Beginning of Andean Civilization" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multi-elemental analytical techniques like X-Ray Fluorescence have been employed to determine the use of space through residues left behind from human activities. In addition, methodologies primarily used in other disciplines such as pollen analysis or micromorphology can illuminate the...
Notes from the Past: Identifying Communities of Practice within Musical Gestures and Production Techniques of Pre-Columbian Greater Nicoya Aerophones from the Tempisque Period (500 B.C. - A.D. 300) (2016)
Typically ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as musical gestures and sound, are often overlooked in the reconstruction of Greater Nicoya culture history. Musical instruments offer clues to our understanding of cultural practices and the kinds of interactions between groups of individuals. Developing from recent research based on both archaeological and museum collections, my research examines—from a music archaeology perspective—a variety of highly decorated and culturally imbued...
One Settlement, Many Communities . . . (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research centered in the prehispanic urban settlement of Cerro de Oro, in the Peruvian South Coast, is showing a wide variety of cooking techniques, disposal arrangements, and even culinary preferences that seem to reflect possible different social groupings within the settlement. This paper will...
Performative Informality Hurts Everyone: Getting to the Root of Intersectional Inequalities in Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation will discuss subtle forms of intersectional inequality that arise when academic communities are conceptualized as friendship-based and egalitarian, rejecting explicit hierarchy. I have described this as "performative informality" and argued that it stems from a...
Place-Making, Erasure, and the Death of Kingship at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Late Classic Period (550–800 CE) at Pacbitun, a sequence of events took place that changed the landscape of power and sacredness in the site’s core during a tumultuous time in the Belize River Valley. The sequence of caches and burials likely began in order to consecrate a new courtyard (Court 3) and establish the new center of power at the site....
Plain Pots Do Travel: Insights into Mogollon Early Pithouse Period Pottery Circulation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Local Development and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Pre-Hispanic Southwestern New Mexico and Southeastern Arizona" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics in the Mogollon region, particularly the Mimbres Mogollon, have been the focus of numerous neutron activation analysis (NAA) studies to discern pottery circulation and social networks throughout the region. However, most of these studies have focused on the painted...
Pottery Analysis as a Window into Site Function and Community Identity: A Haudenosaunee Case Study (2018)
Previous analyses at two early contact period Haudenosaunee village sites in the Cayuga region of central New York State (Parker Farm and Carman) have provided evidence for differences in the intensity of occupation and in the distribution of activities. Interpretations of site activities have included a more intensive focus on pottery production and utilization at Parker Farm and greater emphasis on hunting and shell bead production at Carman. Although differences in the reasons for the...
Pottery Production and Community Practices: Haudenosaunee in Central New York (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on the practices of potters within several communities in central New York State. This area was occupied during late prehistoric/early historic times and abandoned shortly after contact when populations were consolidating in greater numbers in neighboring regions. Occupants at two of these sites (Parker Farm and Carman) were engaged in...
Pottery Rituals and Ritual Pottery: Ceramic Production, Use, and Disposal among the Guancavilca of Coastal Ecuador (AD 800–1532) (2018)
The Colonche Valley of coastal Ecuador represents an east-west corridor as well as the apex of north-south interconnected valleys. Hilltop sites of the Manteno-Guancavilca (AD 800-1532) have been reported across the high flat ridgetops of these valleys since the early 20th century. Recent comparative analysis of surface vessels at newly discovered sites in the eastern Colonche Valley demonstrates the coalescence of examples of all types found at sites throughout the valleys. Mineralogical and...
Potting Communities on a Purépecha Landscape, Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documentation of the chaîne opératoire allows us to investigate the manufacturing steps that transform raw materials into finished products. Study of these steps can facilitate discussions about the intentions of ancient potters and potter communities of practice. In western Mesoamerica during the Late...
Power and Practice, Trauma and Resilience: Exploring the Experiences of Canadian Archaeologists (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do different archaeological practitioners experience and navigate the power inequities built into our disciplinary institutions? Our 2019 online survey of Canadian archaeologists gathered information from over 550 students and practitioners. It explored experiences of sexual...
Practical Approaches to Indigenous Archaeology in Cultural Resource Management (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Practical approaches to Indigenous Archaeology in Cultural Resource Management (CRM) can have real impacts on United States archaeology. This paper discusses the broader theoretical approaches and “high-level” changes that are being made (or could/should) be made in CRM. What types of changes can field techs/archaeologists make that work towards a more...
Practicing Communities and Experimental Bioarchaeology: A Look at the Tiwanaku (AD 500–1100) and Their Descendant Communities in Bolivia (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. Using ethnographic interviews and experimental (bio)archaeology, over 20 individuals participated in this research to look for movement similarities between their modern labor and tasks their Tiwanaku ancestors likely performed, as shown by skeletal...
Pragmatism, Archaeology, and the Race Woman (2018)
At the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls in Chicago, and at Pauli Murray’s childhood home, in Durham, NC, black women were in motion, actively reshaping their social worlds. Pragmatism, a philosophy of actions, effects, and consequences is a useful framework for 1) drawing out their theoretical contributions to 20th century social thought and civic activism; 2) understanding their actions via the archaeological record; and 3) thinking through what archaeologies of their lives might mean for us...
Privileged Knowledge and Perspectives: Tribal Archaeology of, by, and for a Community in Oregon (2018)
Today, the increased involvement of Tribes in Cultural resources and historic preservation has resulted in culturally specific understanding and knowledge being integrated into the shared heritage of place. This emerging shift toward Tribal inclusion in policies and understanding is also reflective in Tribal inclusion of archaeological practice and methods for reconnecting with place and practice. For the past five years The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, has utilized archaeological methods...
Provenance Analysis of Tempering Materials using Quantitative Petrography in the Formative Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics sourcing studies in the Basin of Mexico suffer from the interior drainage problem. Sediment erodes from the mountains and mixes as it drains inward toward the lake at the center. Material composition, and the ceramics made from them, grades subtly over space as a result, making provenance analysis difficult. In a prior...
A Provenance and Stylistic Study of Formative Caddo Vessels: Evidence for Specialized Ritual Craft Production and Long-Distance Exchange (2018)
Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis is used to determine whether Formative Caddo finewares (A.D. 850 -1150) were made locally in the Arkansas River Basin or produced by their Gulf Coastal Plain neighbors to the south. The preliminary INAA results, in concert with a stylistic study that indicates very few potters had the knowledge and skill to produce them, show that Formative Caddo finewares were made in the southern Caddo region and exported north to Arkansas River Basin mound centers for...