Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

Power depends on certain modes of relation between people and things; a fact archaeologists have recognized for some time. Thus there can be no states or rulers without monuments, elite regalia, official iconographies and the like—although traditionally it is only the human component that has been seen as the active element in this equation. More recently, archaeologists have sought to reconsider humans not as the users of things, but as their partners and co-participants in the social. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Chavez.

This paper explores roles played by objects in forging and cementing local and state identities at a Tiahuanaco cemetery at Cundisa in Copacabana, Bolivia. The cemetery consists of 98 Tiahuanaco burials excavated by the Yaya-Mama Archaeological Project. The majority of tombs contain a single individual. Most of the complete objects associated with these burials belong to classic Tiahuanaco style of decorated pottery, but there is also another peculiar pattern of unfired clay miniatures and large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brzezinski. Vanessa Monson. Arthur Joyce. Sarah Barber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent ontological turn in archaeological research has resulted in a proliferation of theoretical approaches inspired by non-representational and non-anthropocentric scholarship. In relational ontologies such as those of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, objects could possess a life force that allowed them to engage with other animate beings, to animate other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Morris.

This is an abstract from the "Northern Rio Grande History: Routes and Roots" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The New Buffalo Commune of northern New Mexico was a countercultural mecca during the late 1960s and 1970s, drawing in young folks from around the country who sought escape from the industrialism, capitalism, and militarism of mid-twentieth-century American society. It was a community of those who were looking to return to lost relationships...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Bennett.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the larger debates in studies of Bronze age Vietnam is the symbolic meaning of Dong Son drums. However, in the academic haste to find this overarching meaning there are several questions that have been left unanswered regarding iconographic variation. In this paper, it is my goal to address the iconographic variability of these drums and explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John L. Creese. Kathleen Bragdon.

The incorporation of the dead into the social practices of the living – as revealed by mortuary practices in the Native Northeast – is especially relevant to current archaeological theories of materiality, value, and consumption. This paper presents comparative data from southern New England Algonquian and northern Iroquoian societies to argue that mass burials (including ossuaries and cemeteries) typical of sixteenth and seventeenth century Northeastern aboriginal societies reflected new...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kong Cheong.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often use both archaeological data and historical records to assist in their reconstruction of the past. However, historical records are usually written by a small portion of the population and this written history is usually about themselves and not a representation of the whole. The inarticulate Whites are a group of European descent people...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marit Munson.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring the World: People and Colors in Southwestern Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists working in the Southwest have consistently recovered examples of prepared paints, and the pigments used to make them, during excavation. These materials are usually present in relatively small quantities, though, so they tend to get noted in field reports and then lost within the archaeological literature....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Casella.

According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, by December 2009 approximately 7.25 million American adults were under some form of correctional supervision – a category that includes probation, parole, jail and prison. This population represented 724 people per 100,000 – or 3.1% of adult US residents. The evolution of our carceral society was neither inevitable nor accidental. This paper explores archaeological perspectives on institutional confinement to question why a leading modern state...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Joyce.

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. This paper examines the materiality of two ruined monumental architectural complexes in prehispanic Oaxaca: the Main Plaza of the mountaintop city of Monte Albán in the Oaxaca Valley and the acropolis of Río Viejo located on the Río Verde’s coastal floodplain. Both of these impressive complexes were important political and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. John W. Janusek.

Archaeologists working in the Lake Titicaca Basin have become accustomed to treating Formative material traits - whether a style of decorated pottery, ritual architecture, or stone sculpture – as the “Yayamama Religious Tradition”. This term, originally defined by Sergio Chavez and Karen Mohr Chavez, has become a shorthand to refer to what is presumed to be a common approach to ceremonialism across the Titicaca Basin (see also Chavez 2004). More recently, scholars have associated it with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Luisa Vázquez De Ágredos Pascual. Cristina Vidal Lorenzo. Patricia Horcajada Campos. Núria Feliú Beltrán.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The houses of Chajul, region of Ixil, Guatemala, have preserved stucco coatings and mural paintings from the colonial period. Since 2019, the University of Valencia (Spain) has collaborated with the Jagiellonian University (Poland) within the framework of the Project of Conservation of Chajul Murals–COMUCH. The objective of this study has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristi Peterson.

Devotional sculptures and their attendant ritual interactions allow for pointed critical engagement with the very nature of images, both formally and in the intersection of art and sacra. To that end, this paper will explore the manner by which ixiptla (lit. representation), a type of central Mexican cult effigy, functioned to shape conceptions of space, place, and cultural identity in the Postclassic Period. By investigating their position within the visual milieu, I posit that, through their...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Overholtzer.

Precisely dated household middens at the Aztec site of Xaltocan suggest that Aztec imperial matter—decorated serving vessels imported from Tenochtitlan and small spindle whorls used to produce tribute cloth, for example—often predates imperial formation and expansion by nearly a century. In this paper, I consider the analytical purchase we might get in explaining this puzzling finding by considering literature from the material turn; Khatchadourian, Bauer, Kosiba, and others have recently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Colvin. Victor Thompson.

Recent materiality scholarship seeks to understand the entangled world of belief and practice. The experience of the world is both cognitive and material and scholars are beginning to embrace the idea that there is no separation between the two. Understanding the intertwined nature of the cognitive and material world is at the center for evaluating the nature of groups that embrace a relational view of the world. In this paper, we consider the essential role that material culture plays in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Arjona.

  This essay draws from contemporary strands of affect and materiality in queer theory to discuss a network of queer animacies in the historic record.  Using examples of late 19th and early 20th century jook joints , I explore a range of affective material relationships that threaten heteronormative ideals.  This attempts to move beyond privileging sexual acts and orientations as defining queerness, towards a queer historical framework attuned to the vast network of human and material...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Phillips.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 100 years, an alternative written record has been tied to the underbelly of Los Angeles’ built environment. The urban infrastructure of railroads, bridges, storm drain tunnels, harbors, and paved rivers houses a vernacular history inscribed mostly on concrete with rocks, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Bragdon.

For more than fifty years, scholars have been debating the role of the shell "currency" known as wampum (wampampeag), which began to circulate among the Native societies of New England in the seventeenth century, stimulated by the Dutch and English fur trade in the region. Following an assessment of current scholarship on the Dutch in New England in the early contact era, this paper further explores the role that wampum played within Native societies as a symbol of wealth, as well as its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Krantz.

This paper examines what might be called the "palimpsest panel" rock art tradition of the northern Rio Grande region of New Mexico. Palimpsest panels are rock faces with petroglyphs that have accrued in a layered fashion through time. Prior research into such panels has typically focused on questions of chronology, each layer representing a distinct culture-historical era of iconographic production or a chapter in a linear chronology. Here, however, I move away from the traditional chronological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn. Kendal Jackson. Victor D Thompson.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historical and archaeological evidence provides a compelling association of the Native town of Tocobaga with the Safety Harbor site (8PI2), in Tampa Bay, Florida. The Spanish briefly established a mission-fort at Tocobaga in 1567. Responding to abuse by the colonizers, the Tocobagans killed the soldiers and the Spanish burned the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernanda Neubauer.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The information potential of fire-cracked rocks (FCR) and their associated features remain surprisingly understudied, given that they are ubiquitous at many sites, often well preserved, are little affected by the activity of collectors, and span hundreds of millennia of the human experience. Whereas FCR preserves well,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Luis Punzo Díaz. Ben Nelson.

This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning with the first investigations in Paquimé, one of the most important issues that archaeologists have identified was the site’s apparently intimate relationship with Mesoamerica. This idea is supported by relatively abundant copper objects, as well as ceramic remains from southern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jelly Juliane Souza De Lima.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many Amerindian worldviews, commensality pervades to different degrees both mundane and ritual spheres, being a way of caring and building relationships as revealed by available information from ethnology and ethnohistory. Based on these issues, this paper explores the central concepts of body...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Pavlovics. Courtney Sprain. Lindsay Bloch. Neill Wallis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The methods used in artifact provenance in archaeological research is constantly being added to and updated. Identifying the geographical origin of the artifacts can provide information about past mobility patterns and interaction networks. There are a number of mineralogical and elemental methods currently used to characterize pottery composition, but they...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paula Dupuy.

For decades, descriptions of prehistoric Eurasian pastoral societies would present ceramic typologies as material evidence for macro scale economic, social, and ideological cohesion – and trans-Eurasian interaction. However, recent investigations that focus more on human-environment interactions and domestic economies reveal a more dynamic and varied past in micro-regions of Eurasia. Pastoral strategies dating to the 3rd-2nd millennium BCE were regionally diverse, and societies were engaged in...