Materiality (Other Keyword)
26-50 (151 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food was central to the constitution of sacred public spaces during the Formative period in the lower Río Verde valley on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. Public facilities at small sites and at the region’s largest precolumbian architectural complex, the Río Viejo acropolis, were the location not only of collective food consumption but also of food...
Consuming in Empire: The Materiality of Household Consumption at Postclassic and Colonial Xaltocan, Mexico (2015)
Consumption, as Paul Mullins explains, "revolves around the acquisition of things to confirm, display, accent, mask, and imagine who we are and who we wish to be." Consumer choices of goods in the marketplace relate to the desire to connect oneself with particular networks of people and places on the landscape, and these connections play a role in the formation of personal and household identity. Here, I present research on the social dimensions inherent in economic practices, which are notably...
Consumption Practice and the Authenticity of "Irishness": Everyday Material Life on the Islands of Inishark and Inishbofin, Co. Galway, Ireland (2018)
How were mass-produced consumer goods incorporated into everyday expressions of local and national identity in 19th and early 20th century Ireland? While archaeologists have explored the myriad ways that mass-produced goods circulated throughout the British Empire through networks of trade and exchange, less attention has been given to the way specifically British manufactured goods were incorporated into meaningful practices of material consumption within Irish communities. This project...
Context database of artifact counts for spaces in which board games were found in Bronze Age Cyprus (2014)
This dataset contains artifact counts for every space in Bronze Age Cypriot settlements in which game boards were found. Artifact classes are explained in: Crist, Walter. 2016. Games of Thrones: Board Games and Social Complexity in Bronze Age Cyprus. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University.
Contrasting Cartographies: Mapping a Maya Site Using Multiple Perspectives (2018)
Archaeologists routinely engage with concepts of space and materiality as we inscribe meanings onto the architecture and objects left behind by past peoples. However, in doing so, we bring explicitly modern sensibilities to our interpretations. In this paper, we consider alternative interpretations of space and materiality as described by Classic Maya people (250-900 CE). We ask: In what ways do categorizations and interpretations of space at Maya archaeological sites change when traditional...
Cosmologies of Ruins and Ruination: Infrastructures and the Anthropocene (2018)
Scientists debate the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. But as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is recent. And as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene projects a cosmology across history. This paper specifically examines how this cosmology understands the materiality of infrastructures, the built substrate upon which networks of human and non-human worlds intersect and collide. I argue that this cosmology contrasts infrastructures of the recent past as dangerous and polluting against...
Crafting Human/Hieroglyph Relationships in Classic Maya Contexts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...
Cultural Biographies of Japanese Jades: Temporal and Spatial Variability during the Jomon Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jadeitite from the Itoigawa source was highly valued among hunter-gatherers inhabiting the Japanese archipelago during the Jomon period, circulating widely from its discovery during the late Early Jomon (c. 4000 BCE) until the end of the period (c. 400 BCE). While there is some indication that raw...
Cultural Identity and Materiality at French Fort St. Joseph (20BE23), Niles, Michigan (2018)
Fort St. Joseph was one of many French colonial outposts established throughout the St. Lawrence River Valley and the western Great Lakes region in the late 17th-18th centuries to cultivate alliances with Native peoples. The result was an exchange, amalgamation, and reinterpretation of material goods that testify to the close relationships the French maintained with various Native American groups. Yet, closer examination suggests that both the French and Natives employed material goods in...
The Death Within: Bone as Material among the Maya (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Houston’s "The Life Within" is among the most perceptive and nuanced statements on Classic Maya materials and the animate quality of things. Here, I draw inspiration from this future-classic work to more deeply probe Maya understandings of bone – a material most generally treated by...
Deposition in Death and Domestic Contexts at Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora Mexico (2018)
How sherds ultimately enter the archaeological record reflect the roles and beliefs regarding the discard, reuse and repurposing of pottery across the Southwest US and Northwest Mexico. This paper examines the deposition of whole vessels and ceramic sherds from Cerro de Trincheras, Sonora, Mexico. It compares two contexts: the debris of domestic spaces, and the careful internment of vessels as part of mortuary ritual. The ceramic deposition practices of Trinchereños (Trincheras Tradition...
Difference, Non-correspondence and the Material Contexts of Sociality (2015)
Human beings use three signalling systems, words, actions and material which differ in their replication rates, the degree to which the signals persist and their magnitude. Speech replicates rapidly and transmits a signal over a small distance that last only briefly. Action in the form of positioning and gestures replicates more slowly and can carry its signal for somewhat longer. Material by contrast is replicated more slowly, sometimes very slowly. Material signals, such as the dimensions of...
A (Different) Pot for Every Grave: Multiscalar Burial Analysis of a Bronze Age Cemetery in Eastern Kazakhstan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in Central Asian Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric site of Koken, located in the semiarid foothills of eastern Kazakhstan, records a deep history of human occupation spanning the Mesolithic to historical periods. Our research at Koken since 2019 has focused on an integrated habitation, rock art, and cemetery complex dating to the Bronze Age. We will present...
Digging in the Wilderness: Uncovering George Washington’s Formal Mount Vernon Landscape. (2015)
In January of 1785, George Washington began work to create a western vista that would be visible from his home based on European landscape design principles. This process included developing and redesigning the grounds around the mansion into a single system, reshaping the upper and lower gardens, laying out a bowling green, planting shrubberies and wildernesses, and planning walks around and through these elements. Archaeological investigations in the spring of 2014 focused on the north...
Directional Color Schemes at Chaco Canyon: Quaternary Patterns in Ornaments and Minerals from Kiva Offerings (2019)
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. The placement of colorful ornaments, marine shell, and minerals in discrete ritual deposits is a long-lived practice in the Ancestral Pueblo region. This tradition is exemplified in Chaco Canyon, where numerous ceremonial deposits comprised of such objects have been documented in kivas and other rooms within great houses....
Distributed Remains, Distributed Minds: The Materiality of Autopsy and Dissection (2018)
Excavations at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery produced a large subset of burials showing evidence of autopsy and dissection. In addition to the osteological evidence of autopsy and dissection, these burials also contained broken equipment and medical refuse which reflect the medical, pedagogical, and medicolegal procedures in use at the turn of the last century. An incorporated study of these materials is necessary to examine the connection between the practical engagement with...
Early Colonial Material Entanglements at Tlaxcallan, Mexico: Insights from a Polychrome Ceramic Sherd Disk (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plus Ultra: An examination of current research in Spanish Colonial/Iberian Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology in the Western Hemisphere." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In October 1519, the fiercely independent Tlaxcallan state first sent aid for Cortés’s conquest efforts, establishing a community of people who identified as Indigenous conquerors. By the mid-16th century, Indigenous peoples in Tlaxcala...
The Earthly Production of Fleshy Subjects in the South-Central Andes (2015)
A specific range of human subjects, or fully socialized, moral persons- rigorously categorized according to age, sex, kinship, and so forth -are, of course, the most critical ‘things’ that any society seeks to produce. I investigate the production of prehispanic human subjects in the Lake Titicaca Basin of the South American Andes. To understand the emergence of the Middle Horizon center of Tiwanaku at around AD 500, I investigate the deployment of innovative spatial, material, and...
Emergent Materialities of 19th c. Nipmuc Basketry (2016)
This paper examines a collection of iron artifacts from the Sarah Burnee/Sarah Boston Site, a late 18th- and early 19th-century Nipmuc homestead in Grafton, Massachusetts. While the objects recovered have a broad range of purposes, the assemblage is assessed for its utility in the practice of woodsplint basketmaking, an emerging Indigenous industry in 19th-century New England, and the purported trade of one of the homestead’s inhabitants. Native woodsplint baskets were valued by Anglo-American...
End-of-Life Purges of Massive Domestic Assemblages: Staging Archaeological Interventions and Reanimating the Social Lives of Discarded Belongings (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North American houses are among the largest in the world and, for the better part of a century, their occupants have been accumulating and storing possessions at a rate and volume unlike any other period in human history. These lifelong-amassed assemblages are rarely kept or valued by descendants, and at the conclusion of homeowners’ lives, the bulk of...
Enduring Traditions, Material Transformations: Understanding Wari State Influence in Highland Ancash, Peru (2018)
Scholars have debated the nature of Wari state expansion during the Middle Horizon in north-central Peru for decades, suggesting both top-down imperialism and local resistance. While our paper does not aim to resolve this issue, we put previously reported datasets into conversation to examine both social change and cultural resilience in the Middle Horizon (MH). We draw on ceramic and mortuary evidence from the Callejón de Huaylas region of highland Ancash and identify the incorporation of a...
Ephemeral Objects: An Alternative Perspective on the Maquetas of San Jose de Moro (2018)
This presentation examines the collection of unfired clay models, or maquetas, from the Moche site of San José de Moro, Peru, proposing an interpretation focused on their unique materiality and position within the artistic corpus at the site. A renewed focus on Moche architectural representation treats these three-dimensional models as miniaturized, mimetic sculptures of monumental buildings, often used to understand the function of ceremonial space in the past. As of 2012, fifty maquetas have...
Erasing the Past: The Intentional Forgetting of Amarna Period Artifacts in the Tomb of Tutankhamun (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tutankhamun, one of the last kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt (circa 1330-1300 BCE), was buried in an non-royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. His burial assemblage is one of the most intact burials ever discovered in Egypt. Amongst the many items, are atypical items that have not been found in other late Eighteenth Dynasty burials....
Ethnography in the Unit: Archaeology As Elicitation (2018)
Ethnographic approaches to archaeology have explored the way in which archaeological projects are themselves a fruitful site of study (Castenada and Matthews 2008; Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos 2009). This paper will build on these approaches to explore how Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) archaeological projects open up a rich space for ethnographic inquiry. The paper develops a methodology that uses archaeology both as a craft and metaphor (Gonzalez-Ruibal 2013) in order to elicit...
Exploring the Matter of Mary in Early Colonial Ecuador: Indigenous Appropriations and Material Substrates (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper foregrounds the agency of indigenous peoples in the equatorial Andes in their interactions with the early evangelizers of Christianity. Looking at both historical and contemporary evidence, I consider the material responses of native people to the “unnatural” worldview that...