Materiality (Other Keyword)
1-25 (151 Records)
Pan de Azúcar de Nivín is located 23km east to the city of Casma, in the small town of Nivín, at the right margin of the Casma River Valley in the Department of Ancash, Peru. In June and July 2017, a team of archaeologists from Louisiana State University carried out mapping and excavation operations at this important archaeological complex. Through limited excavations, architectural mapping, surface collection and the analysis of associated materials, the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológico...
The Active Materiality of Obsidian (2019)
This is an abstract from the "2019 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of M. Steven Shackley" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Steve Shackley informed me that over 90% of obsidian samples from Puerto Escondido, Honduras, that he had analyzed came from an unidentified source, presumably nearby, he started a process of re-education that led me to a place where he may not be comfortable, but that I deeply appreciate. This involves a...
Antarctic Heritage, Materiality and Narratives (2016)
This paper is framed in a broader theoretical discussion on the role that materiality plays in the building of the Master Narratives of Antarctic History. In order to explore the scope of the Antarctic Heritage at present I have studied the following items and the relationships they bear to one another: a) some of the most widely spread versions of the Antarctic History; b) the process for designating Historic Sites and Monuments under the Antarctic Treaty and the characteristics of the...
Archaeological Evidence for Islamic Uses of Megalithic Structures in al-Andalus (CE 711-1492) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the time of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the landscape was dotted with countless ancient sites, including megalithic monuments constructed between the 6th and 3rd millennium BCE. Were these sites ignored, defaced, or destroyed, as they dated to the time before Muhammad (Age of Ignorance/ jāhilīyah), or is there archaeological evidence for...
The Archaeology of Gender in Historic America (2013)
Gendered social relations are fundamental to human experience. The ways in which individuals understand their roles as gendered beings and their relationships to other gendered beings is constantly pushed and pulled by forces both internal and external to the individual and the family/social/economic unit to which they belong at multiple scales from the household to the community to the nation. Identity, sexuality, cultural prescriptions for social roles, socioeconomic class, ethnic heritage,...
An archeology of segregation after the unification of Methodism in Washington, D.C. (2018)
Emory Church in Northwest Washington, D.C. hosts a Pan-African Methodist congregation, but historically Emory Church was aligned with Southern Methodism, and had a segregated White congregation until the beginning of the 1960s. Soon after the integration of the church, the last White pastor departed as did the remaining White members of the congregation, leaving the church to a small community of worshipers in 1968. Archeological mitigation undertaken in 2016 as part of the redevelopment of the...
Assessing Connections between the Spoked Wheel and Bronze Age Elite Social Identities (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The wheel may be the greatest, and most enduring, technological innovation in human history. Certainly, the wheel transformed the potential and efficacy of transportation technologies, trade and exchange systems, not to mention human mobility. The innovation of the wheel produced...
The Authentication of the Codex Maya of Mexico, Previously Known as the Grolier, through Scientific Analysis (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After 45 years of polemic about the Codex Grolier, the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia of Mexico finally decided to undertake major scientific studies on this document to evaluate its authenticity. During...
Baudrillard in Castroville, Texas: Traces of Contemporary America in the Biry/Tschirhart Families’ Home (2017)
In his 1986 travel memoir Amérique, Jean Baudrillard defined America as a constant flow of things: cars and highways, screens and electricity, rivers and geological silence. Everything flows as if the continental vastness of the U.S. could be reduced to a smooth surface that flattens historical time. The result is a landscape defined by regular surfaces that are symmetrical to the predictability of social practices. In this paper, I argue that America’s flow of things has a genealogy, and that...
Beads of Bondage: Global Displacement and Cultural Connections in Western Tennessee (2021)
This is a poster submission presented at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historic glass trade beads found at plantation archaeological sites have been identified as markers of African and African American culture and expression. In the southeastern United States, the presence of beads can be attributed to inter-cultural exchange with Native Americans and/or strategically obtained through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Since 2011, Rhodes College has located and...
Beyond the Final Frontier: Time and Materiality in the Peripheralization of Bronze Age Eurasian Steppe Pastoral Societies (2018)
Archaeologists studying prehistoric Eurasian steppe pastoral lifeways often seek inclusion into comparative research of urbanism, craft production, and complexity. Even as these studies contribute valuable information, they also reify their place in the intellectual periphery of archaeological inquiry. This peripheralization is due to several factors. First, the Eurasian steppe is perhaps unwittingly conceptualized as a relatively timeless socio-geographical periphery to "state-level" social...
Binaries, Landforms, and Clam Gardens on the Northwest Coast of North America (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The imposition of colonial authority throughout the Indigenous Northwest Coast of North America brought with it two long-standing western binaries—agricultural/not and natural/anthropogenic. Within these, Northwest Coast peoples were viewed as not agricultural (useful for alienating them from land) and...
Borderland Processes and the Question of BMAC in NE Iran (2018)
How frontiers and borders are conceptualized in archaeology is critically influenced by the approaches and perspectives in culture contact research. Absence of written documents from Bronze Age Central Asia severely limits the application of such theories. The nature of the Bronze Age civilization of Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) in Central Asia, and its dispersion to neighboring NE Iran has been a long-lasting question in study of Prehistoric Western Asia. This paper aims to...
Building Social Complexity: Differences in Bedrock Use at Early Formative Etlatongo in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Construction materials such as earthen fills have frequently been an afterthought for many archaeologists interested in understanding past social relations in Mesoamerica. In this paper we reconcile this situation by assessing how the relationship between humans and materials, in regard to the use of construction fills, may have played out a significant role...
Bundled Time: An Analysis of an Intrasite Sac-Be Assemblage at Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico (2023)
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. After Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1821, foreign explorers began traveling throughout the Maya area and documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. In photographs, drawings, and written reports, these explorers depicted Maya ruins as deserted and lifeless, and...
Chalchihuites*: Jade Histories of Value and Matter in the Early Modern World (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A well-known passage in the Florentine Codex offers a natural history of *chalchihuitl: its revelation to a few “knowledgeable ones” by the vapor it exudes from underground when viewed against the sun’s first rays; its varieties of green, luminosity, and hardness; the lapidary methods that bring out its brightness and...
Characterization Using Raman Spectroscopy of Amazonite and Turquoise of Tomb II, Tingambato, Michoacán, México (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Tingambato is located in the state of Michoacán, in a transitional zone between the highlands and the lowlands of the Balsas River. This geographical location allowed a long distance interchange...
Chemical Indices as a Key to Context: The Use of pXRF to Reassemble Maya Mural Fragments from San Bartolo, Guatemala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The dissemination of wall paintings from the Late Preclassic period Maya site of San Bartolo, Guatemala, have focused on the in situ north and west walls of the buried chamber named Sub-1A. In contrast to their excellent...
Classic Maya Material Worlds: Using Cultural Models to Transform Archaeological Practice and Interpretation (WGF - Post PhD Research Grant) (2015)
This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigated how Classic Maya individuals understood the objects that archaeologists characterize as 'artifacts,' and applied this Maya material perspective to modern archaeological practices in order to transform how we interpret excavations at Classic Maya sites. To accomplish this, the project focused on three activities: reconstructing elements of a Classic Maya perspective on the...
Coins and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (2018)
Scholars have asked how empires solidify power when colonizers, the agents of empire-building, often have diverse goals and backgrounds and their actions do not necessarily support the goals of the empire. Two answers to this question have received much attention: that empires promote ideologies that support cohesion among colonizers, and that coercion and violence can promote the expansion of empires. I propose a third answer, in which colonizers create varied material forms that may challenge...
Colorful material connections: Non-invasive analyses of Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts and their cultural-historical implications (2017)
Non-invasive scientific analyses recently performed by the ‘MOLAB’ mobile laboratory on a number of pre-Hispanic and early colonial pictorial manuscripts provided a host of new data that deepen our knowledge of Mesoamerican coloring materials and painting practices. The huge corpus of available analytical data – obtained from codices Madrid, Cospi, Borgia, Vatican B, Laud, Fejérváry-Mayer, Nuttall, Bodley, Selden, Selden Roll, Tudela, Vatican A, and Mendoza – allows the first cultural-historical...
Communities of Practice and Sound-related Archaeological Collections (2017)
This paper explores an alternative method for examining ephemeral aspects of material culture, such as sound, in the production processes of ceramic pre-Columbian aerophone construction. In a case study of a museum collection from the G-752Rj site in Greater Nicoya, I demonstrate that it is possible to identify groups of producers and evidence of knowledge transfer between persons that may reflect communities of practice. This research has the potential for examining regional trade and migration...
A Comparative Analysis of Mortuary and Domestic Artifacts from Petra’s North Ridge (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting the use of material culture in mortuary contexts provides an intimate view of social identity of both the deceased and mourners in ancient societies. However, the material remains of mortuary practices throughout the Nabataean Kingdom in Jordan have not been systematically investigated. Comparing the material culture between contemporary...
Complicating the Religious/Secular Dichotomy Through Object Biographies: An Investigation of Mesa Verde Style Mugs (2018)
Scholars acknowledge that religious and secular rituals are difficult to distinguish. This is especially true in the archaeological record, where human beliefs and worldviews must be understood through material correlates. In order to make categories simpler to use, Western scholars have tended to dichotomize religious and secular. Exploring the role of Mesa Verde style mugs in the Ancestral Puebloan world, this paper takes an object biography approach and acknowledges that boundaries between...
Composing the Late Cahokian Countryside: A View from the Rhea Site, St. Clair County, Illinois (2018)
The transition between early (AD 1050-1200) and late Mississippian (AD 1200-1350) in the American Bottom is recognized as a significant moment of socio-political and religious change in the historical trajectory of Cahokia. During this time, relationships between persons, places, and things transformed, resulting in different ways of engaging with both Cahokia and the non-human powers that underwrote it and the broader Mississippian world. With a goal of investigating a Moorehead phase...