Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Fullen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic offerings are an essential practice utilized by the Wari empire of the Central Andes throughout the Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000). While well-known for the Conchopata oversize ceramic offering tradition where large, oversized urns and faceneck jars were ritually smashed in civic-ceremonial events and left in situ or interred, this practice has yet...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Dolfini.

According to Kristian Kristiansen, archaeology is now undergoing a major paradigm-shifting phase akin to the ones that defined the discipline in the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. He dubbed it ‘the third science revolution’, for fast-developing scientific methods, chiefly A-DNA and stable isotope analyses, sit at the core of the current changes. Arguably, similar if less visible changes are occurring in material culture studies. These are fostered by the marrying of new theoretical approaches (e.g....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bridget Zavala. Selene Galindo Cumplido.

The relationship between people and plants is basic to all of human existence. Many archaeologists have considered this relationship as primarily economic, yet ethnographic accounts reveal important social aspects of human-plant interactions. In this paper we consider the long-term relationship between certain plant species (both wild and domesticated- beyond the triad of corn, beans and squash), botanic knowledge and memory in the Sextin valley. Here we present macrobotanical, phytolith and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yan Liu. Xingcan Chen.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Baiyinchanghan site is one of the most important sites of the Xinglongwa Culture (7,500-6,500 B.P.) in NE China. By employing Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus theory, this research explores social relations and cultural ideas by studying occupants’ habitus and social spaces. The habitus and social spaces in this site are demonstrated clearly through its...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robin Skeates.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation defines and evaluates some the key concepts and debates in sensory archaeology, arguing that this field is necessarily a work in progress. Today, there is a growing archaeological interest in the senses, experience and perception; but are we justified in calling for or claiming a ‘sensory turn’ in archaeology? And, besides seeking to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Butler.

This paper explores the relationships between the people, objects and practices that created an Early Classic communal mortuary space at the site of Charco Redondo in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca. The Early Classic follows the collapse of the first Rio Viejo polity, and significant differences in mortuary practices may signify a transformation in how power and authority were constituted. While communal internment continued, burials were generally undisturbed by later internments and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Khatchadourian.

To borrow Yuri Slezkine’s formulation, "the Soviet Union was an empire—in the sense of being very big, bad, asymmetrical, hierarchical, heterogeneous, and doomed". In this it differed little from the early empires that have long held archaeology’s attention. But unlike its precursors, the U.S.S.R. was guided by a political ideology premised vigorously on the relationship between humans and things—between labor, the non-human inputs of production, and property. Imperial sovereignty rested on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Bernard Marcoux. Martha Zierden.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The recent removal of a towering statue of John C. Calhoun has brought much attention to the open park known known as Marion Square in Charleston, South Carolina. Historical and archaeological research demonstrates that the removal, and the protests that led to this event are just the latest instances of social...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dil Basanti.

Aksum, the capital of an ancient northern Ethiopian kingdom (50-700 AD), is well known for its elaborate funerary stelae, the largest of which were carved in the impression of multi-storied “houses.” Prior to a widespread conversion to Christianity, the Aksumites buried their dead in kin-groups either in tombs or in shafts that cluster around the stelae. Human remains are often burned, fragmentary, disarticulated and jumbled, creating an impression of ephemeralness that contrasts with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Astrid Van Oyen.

The capacity for storing surplus has been a key parameter in the hierarchical rankings of socio-political evolution, with empire at the apex. With its large-scale ports and massive warehouses, the Roman empire easily fits this bill. Models of socio-political evolution, however, not only build on top-down templates of power, but also adopt a view of things (i.e. stored goods) as passive resources. But in the light of recent material culture theory, storage becomes a more complex mediation of time...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Johansen. Andrew Bauer.

Water management and iron production were two socio-material practices deeply entangled with the politics of emerging social distinctions during the South Indian Iron Age. Beginning with small well-distributed modified rock pools and systematically dispersed iron-smithing facilities, Iron Age social actors laid specific claims to the materials, places and technologies of water management and iron production. This created and maintained a constellation of social differences and affiliations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

Accounts of ancient infrastructure are very common. Almost every archaeologist who deals with complex polities regularly encounters infrastructure in some form - including roads, irrigation canals, bridges, harbors, aqueducts, recording systems and forts - just to name a few of the most common varieties. That said, the concept is rarely explicitly theorized or defined within the discipline - and is usually identified on the basis of "we know it when we see it". In contrast, this paper seeks to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Olesch. Guido Pezzarossi.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The midwestern “frontier” of the United States formed and was transformed by the lead mining rush of the nineteenth century. Dependent on the volatile market for and production of lead and shaped by the diversely positioned tastes, practices and motivations of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Sosna. Lenka Brunclikova. Tomas Urban.

In this paper, we examine the role of landfills in the construction of landscape. Landfills represent ambiguous spaces where material remains of human action are disposed and forgotten. They tend to be hidden from the view of persons passing by and only those who gone astray might encounter these blind spots on the map. Yet, landfills are well known to the professionals who plan and manage large amounts of waste to transform it into a new kind of assemblage that shapes landscape. In contrast to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch.

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. Archaeology has long sought to distance itself from the present, and despite a small corpus of novel and seminal research emerging over the last four decades, an archaeology that addresses the contemporary has remained only on the fringes of the discipline. Highlighting recent investigations in which the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Bell.

In the wake of several decades of resource extraction (logging and oil/gas exploration), the past as articulated in particular places, material things, names and narratives has taken on new urgency in the Purari Delta. For over a decade communities have struggled to marshal these assemblages of cultural heritage to demonstrate their traditional ownership to acquire resource royalties. An imperfect and highly political process, claimants must overcome the legacies of out-migration, Christianity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, a new political and religious capital expanded its influence in the North American Southwest. This settlement, called Paquimé or Casas Grandes, was the focus of pilgrimages that reflected and reinforced the social dominance of the elites living at the community. However, caches of millions of ocean shell, instances of human sacrifice, and other aspects of the archaeological record indicate that Paquimé itself was likely considered a living entity that helped...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Chicoine.

This is an abstract from the "Casma State Material Culture and Society: Organizing, Analyzing, and Interpreting Archaeological Evidence of a Re-emergent Ancient Polity" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In coastal Ancash, archaeologists have been puzzled by the presence of Casma style objects (~AD 800-1300) at archaeological sites with earlier cultural components. This has led to significant cultural historical and chronological confusion including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Phipps. Lucy Commoner. Nobuko Shibayama.

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. Long distance trade of precious materials such as spondylus shell or turquoise took place in the Precolumbian world. However, at the same time, the associations between particularly local materials and their long-term...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pauketat. Susan Alt.

Various archaeological approaches exaggerate relations with objects at the expense of the affectivity of substances, phenomena, materials, and spaces. New data from the 11th century foundations of the Cahokian world suggest that the experience of substantial, phenomenal, material and spatial qualities were the primary constituents of a form of religious conversion also known as Mississippianization. Circular buildings at the Emerald site embodied these qualities and point to the creation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hauser.

Water and the making of authority has generally been viewed as a basic metabolic need whose capture and distribution provides a nexus through which power flows. The household becomes place of water consumption where subjectification was achieved in other domains and subsequently inscribed into the container. In this paper I take a slightly different approach. Specifically I ask the question, at what point does water become a convenience and how does its status as a convenience inflect both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandria Halmbacher.

Around A.D. 650 the Loma Caldera eruption entombed the Classic Period Maya village of Cerén in 4-6 meters of volcanic ash. This resulted in the exceptional preservation of structures, artifacts and botanical remains, providing archaeologists with a unique opportunity to study the household complexes and their related activities. However, much of the previous research concerning the households at Cerén has primarily focused on its economic activities. As a result, archaeologists have yet to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Novak.

This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To know and to name bodies and their parts, bioarchaeologists rely on intimate encounters with material traces. At times, they closely examine the "same" objects, yet see quite different things. Understanding such difference is usually treated epistemologically. People have alternative vantage points on the same reality, and divergent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francois Richard.

This paper explores rural communities’ historical relationships to state authority in the Siin province (Senegal). I engage with classic literature to examine how the concept of ‘peasant’ might be relevant to archaeological realities in Senegal’s countryside during the Atlantic era, and how it might helpful to think about political identity among social actors chronically understudied (and under-documented) in the African past. I am interested in the term as one way to conceptualize the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shannon Freire.

Archaeologists typically conceptualize the "material" in an integrated analysis of material culture and biological data as artifacts/objects/things recovered through excavation from an historic mortuary setting. However, further explorations of meaning are possible when the definition of material encompasses both what is recovered and produced by archaeologists. Destructive testing, as a component of bioarchaeological analysis, creates additional materialized relationships between the living and...