Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie LeBrell. Geoffrey G. McCafferty. Sharisse D. McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Female figurines of the Greater Nicoya region feature a 2000-year history of thematic continuity. During the Formative and Classic periods (locally Tempisque and Bagaces periods), figurines were often red-slipped, nude females in a seated, kneeling or standing position with hands on hips;...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa M Overholtzer.

Spanish colonialism introduced a host of new pottery types to Indigenous peoples in central Mexico, creating material entanglements not present in the preceding Aztec imperial context. However, the possibilities afforded by these newly-arrived objects were not inevitable. This paper examines how several households at the peripheral Indigenous town of Xaltocan selectively and creatively consumed, appropriated, ignored, and rejected Spanish iconographic and technological elements. This analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Khadene K Harris.

Archaeological interest in postemancipation life on plantations has received significantly less attention than those dating before emancipation. The resulting neglect misses several opportunities to unveil the complexities of postemancipation social and economic life and the impact of full freedom on the material and spatial practices of formerly enslaved individuals. I show how both planters and free people reorganized their physical surroundings and what this reorganization can reveal about...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dil Basanti.

This paper looks at how network theory and materiality may challenge progressive evolutionary models of complexity. Archaeologists working on the African continent have long argued against neoevolutionary models of complexity, advocating instead for understandings that promote dynamism and fluidity. However, the spectre of neoevolution still claims the public imagination: bigger still seems to be better even if we agree it really shouldn’t be. This paper aids in complicating these views by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Arjona.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, African American musicians harnessed the acoustic capacities of stoneware jugs in musical groups that came to be known as "jug bands". These bands played tunes on variety of household objects turned instruments, blending African musical styles with experimental rhythms. In many cases, jugs were the centerpiece of these musical ensembles. Jug players produced tuba-like intonations by blowing and vocalizing into their instruments at different angles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith S. Chesson. Isaac Ullah. Nicholas Ames. Hamish Forbes. Paula Kay Lazrus.

In the early 1800s wealthy landowners acquired lands in the San Pasquale Valley, located 50 km from the provincial capital of Reggio Calabria in southern Calabria, Italy. Internal migration of farmworkers to establish commercial bergamot, olive, grape, and mulberry orchards in this valley created a large and thriving community of farmworker families who built the landowners’ villas, the overseers’ and farmworkers’ houses, and the farming infrastructure of wells, cisterns, aqueducts, mills,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bamidele Odunbaku.

To paraphrase, Akin Ogundiran has posed the question: How did the political contestations between the Oyo imperial power and the frontier communities affect the everyday life of the later, especially the villages and towns located in the frontier zones? An historical archaeological approach that melds oral traditions and ethnography with material culture is being utilized by a number of scholars, working independently at different sites in the Yoruba region (Nigeria), to find answers to this...

PROJECT Uploaded by: Walter Crist

This study frames research on board games within a body of anthropological theory and method to examine the long-term social changes that effect play and mechanisms through which play may influence societal change. Drawing from ethnographic literature focusing on the performative nature of games and their effectiveness at providing a method for strengthening social bonds through grounding, I examine changes in the places in which people engaged in play over the course of the Bronze Age on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Anderson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Very small things, especially ones worn on the body, have unique positions within persons’ lives and across them. They possess their own type of temporal and material persistence, arising not from being large and formidably unmovable, but from an ability to discreetly carry on from one moment and space to another. Given their substance, significations, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariah Wade.

This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Blowing into molten glass gave it form, a breathtaking invention of the first century BCE. Before that, glass vessels were made by using the core-forming technique and by casting, which were more expensive and less efficient methods. Glass blowing enabled the play of forms and color while making glass vessels more accessible to a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bauer.

This paper examines the history of medieval (circa 500-1600 CE) agricultural infrastructure—assemblages of soils, irrigation wells, and processing facilities—in the semi-arid conditions of the Raichur Doab, Southern India. Despite some investiture from ruling elites and temples, the material evidence for agro-infrastructural development suggests that it was not merely a project of state or institutional design. Rather, its development might more productively be characterized as a process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford J Pereira. Caesar Bita.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Globalisation of Sino-foreign Maritime Exchange: Ocean Cultures", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The Chinese navigator Admiral Zheng He led seven epic voyages into the Indian Ocean, reaching the shores of North-Eastern Africa. Chinese historical documentation records his visit to Malindi on the Kenyan coast in 1417-19. Since 2000 there have been several spectacular announcements in Kenya and China that have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Ditto.

At Chaco Canyon, clear indications of social differentiation in the Pueblo world first appeared during the 9th-11th centuries. One materialization of this is the contrast between two contemporaneous architectural forms: great houses, interpreted as populous communities or largely empty centers of seasonal ritual pilgrimage, and small houses, explained as multi-family households. Since ritual artifacts have been excavated from both house categories, analyzing inter- and intra-site variation in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kong Cheong. Linda Howie. Terry Powis.

The Classic Maya crafted a wide variety of music instruments from clay and other materials. Numerous depictions of musicians on vase paintings and murals attest to the important role of music in ceremonial occasions. Music instruments were also interred with the deceased during funerary ceremonies; although their comparative rarity in burials suggests that their inclusion was not a common practice. At the site of Pacbitun, music instruments have been recovered from multiple Classic period...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Hernández Garavito.

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Stories of the Inka Empire: Local Experiences of Ancient Imperialism" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The results from archaeological excavations on a residential settlement and a ritual-public center in Huarochirí suggest minimal use of Inka-style material culture in most everyday life contexts. At the same time, architectural intervention suggests a significant transformation on both sites’ layouts....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luisa Diaz Arriola.

This is an abstract from the "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El registro arqueológico de la costa central peruana durante los períodos tardíos (900-1532 dC) da cuenta de la presencia de conchas y semillas exóticas, y piedras semi preciosas provenientes de la costa nor peruana y del Ecuador. Su presencia se explica a través de dos posibles rutas: la terrestre y la marítima. La etnohistoria grafica que en el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Rosado-Ramirez. 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 introduces the session by discussing recent ideas advanced by ruination studies and the material turn, as well as the role of ruins in Mesoamerican communities. Combining concepts from ruination studies and the “New Materialist” perspective helps us to understand ancient communities as formed by assemblages of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradford M. Jones.

Even as archaeologists continue improving the identification of Spanish colonial sites in Texas, consideration of the archaeological implications of the mix of regional and social identities that made up the settlers sent to populate these sites remains limited. Consequently, most research focuses on the presumed cultural provenance of artifact manufacture – European/Mexican/Chinese/Indigenous - to interpret colonial period sites and the material aspects of emerging frontier identities. While...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Buchanan. Elizabeth Watts Malouchos. Meghan Buchanan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Carbonized shell temper has traditionally been seen as one of the defining hallmarks of Mississippian Period societies in the Midwestern and Southeastern US. The Lower Mississippi River Alluvial Survey (Phillips, Ford, and Griffin 1951) solidified the importance of shell temper in distinguishing Mississippian Period sites and occupation levels from earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brianne E Charles. Eric Burant. Patricia B. Richards.

Of the over 2000 individuals recovered from the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC), approximately one-third are juveniles under the age of 20. Age categories for the MCIG juveniles were established using a variety of dental, osteometric and nonosteometric methods. The example of juvenile lot 10007, (dental age assessment 5 postnatal months, osteometric age 39 fetal weeks) recovered with diaper fabric, safety pins, and a small angel pin, suggests that a more refined look at juvenile age...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Goldner.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeoacoustics: Sound, Hearing, and Experience in Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper in cognitive archaeology studies how skilled agents use eco-acoustical features of the environment as mnemonic device. Beginning with the question, What do trees know about canoes?, I excavate how ways of knowing can be deeply sedimented in nature by drawing on the ethnography of Algonquin rock art and fieldwork...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy F. Markel.

This is a poster submission presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Archaeologists are moving away from just classifying objects in dryly scientific ways that obscure meanings and the past people who used them. We are attempting to view items through the lenses of their users. As we study Native American material culture, this means understanding the agency that inheres in artifacts. Great Lakes Anishinaabeg understood that objects both constrain and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Nicolay. Miranda Fengel.

This is an abstract from the "Defining Perishables: The How, What, and Why of Perishables and Their Importance in Understanding the Past" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In “Entangled,” his landmark theoretical work on the relationship between human beings and material culture, Ian Hodder emphasized the importance of understanding how things endure differently than people. Thus longer-lived objects can bridge gaps and carry meaning between multiple...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith Chesson. Annmarie Lindzy.

Archaeologists have described and discussed households for decades, yet only recently have them made the theoretical leap from residential structures and coresidential units to peoples’ homes. Homes are built, embodied and enlivened by peoples’ actions, thoughts, relationships, experiences and aspirations. This poster presents the results of an ethnoarchaeoogical analysis of homemaking on the islands of Inishbofin and Inishark (co. Galway) as well as Inishturk (co. Mayo) in western Ireland....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia G. Markert.

  In many ways, Castroville, Texas is a world unto itself. As the "Little Alsace" of Texas, it has been built for over a century through work, struggle, and cooperation – with words and materials, memories and relationships. This world is continuously crafted today, through the restoration of historic Alsatian-style houses and the stories that are told about the town and its history. Though Castroville has been a nexus of Alsatian identity in Texas, other Alsatian colonies spread further into...