Materiality (Other Keyword)
76-100 (151 Records)
Dress is an object made up of other objects. I combine a practice approach with the chaîne opératoire and behavior chains methods to analyze technical and social acts involving dress objects. The analysis starts with one segment of the actions involving dress—the actual act of dressing. The study includes only court scenes that appear to memorialize historic events, although some of the observations and conclusions can be applied to other kinds of scenes and other media. After identifying the...
Manifestations of Identity: Materiality, Meaning & Mediation in Early Modern & Contemporary Ireland. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology on the Island of Ireland: New Perspectives" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Perhaps one of the most significant contributions made by historical archaeologists working throughout the island of Ireland is the promotion of archaeology’s remedial effects in terms of conflict mediation and reconciliation. Using the material record to challenge Ireland’s sense of cultural identity, key...
Mantelpieces and the Homemaking: Exploring memory through the small and ordinary, 20th century, Ireland (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Materialities: Tracing Connections through Materiality of Daily Life", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. To a 20th century Irish islander, mundane objects on the mantelpiece above the fireplace are not just humdrum keepsakes, economic tools, common items, or assets; rather these objects provided a point of entry into the emotional landscape of memory, identity, and belonging in the Irish home. The...
Material Engagement and the Incarceration Experience at Amache (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Diverse and Enduring: Archaeology from Across the Asian Diaspora" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Biennially field school students, researchers, and community members assemble at the Granada Relocation Center (Amache) for a five week field season culminating in a two day community open house. This diverse group surveys, excavates, and discusses the historical events surrounding the incarceration of Japanese...
Material Engagements with Japanese American Incarceration History (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was a traumatic event that had lasting repercussions on multiple communities. Archaeologists have sought to productively pursue community-based methodologies in studying this period, employing object based oral histories, outreach events, and community participation in fieldwork. However, less...
Material Narratives of Repression (2018)
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the establishment of a new social and dictatorial order led by General Francisco Franco were heavily marked by and imposed through tactics of repression. My fieldwork at different points of Spain revolves around the materiality of repression and the interaction between this particular materiality and the local communities. In spite of the fact that this particular materiality appears to be dominated by absence and silence, in this paper I want to explore in...
Materialities of Religious Transformation from Coast to Coast in Pre-Columbian Florida (2016)
During the 7th century in Florida, a decisive shift is apparent in the ways people were positioned in relation to burial sites and how they manufactured and interacted with portable objects. The transition ushered in the Weeden Island archaeological culture, well-known for the prevalence of exquisitely crafted pottery vessels and a characteristic mortuary regime widely adopted across the Gulf coastal plain and beyond. This paper examines the historical moment of change in terms of shifting...
The Materiality and Creation of Constructed Space at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2018)
This paper explores the ontological relationality between humans and the creation of space during the Cruz B phase (1200/1150-850 BC) in the late Early Formative Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca. In particular, we focus on how the use of bedrock afforded the construction of a ‘lived’ place. By looking at the materiality of its intrinsic properties, we argue that the Mixtecs of Etlatongo intentionally used bedrock as part of construction episodes in the formation of a public space so that...
Materiality and Memory in Northwest Iberia: Water, Metal, and Stone (2021)
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. In this paper, I explore the attractant qualities of water, metal, and stone as they have intertwined with human memory-making over three millennia in northwest Iberia. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, the confluence of the Rios Sar and Ulla may have been an important liminal space, as people consigned weapons and other metal...
The Materiality and Mobility of Jade in the Upper Usumacinta Basin (2015)
Distributions of jade in the Upper Usumacinta basin suggest that the movement of jade followed political connections and were not purely instances of down-the-line trade motivated by economic gain. Jade objects were likely gifted between elites to solidify political relationships. Some sites along the Usumacinta River received a wealth of jade, while others were relatively impoverished and turned to replicas or other forms of symbolic capital. The materiality of jade during the Classic period...
The Materiality of Authority: I7th Century Native Leadership in Colonial New England through the Lens of Value Theory (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practices of men and women leaders in Native Southern New England pose a number of interesting questions for scholars interested in the intersection of materiality and value. In the 17th and early 18th century, Native leaders claimed authority through descent, colonial patronage, and/or religious practice. Central to their success moreover, was...
Materiality of Homemaking: Dressers, Delph, and Heirlooms in western Ireland (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Global Materialities: Tracing Connections through Materiality of Daily Life", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. What can everyday Irish dressers and delph tell us about family history, rural life, and global connections? As part of the multiyear Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast Project, I have researched dressers and their contents, including curated ceramic and glass vessels and other objects, to conduct...
The Materiality of Human-Animal Relationships: Animals as Hides, Furs, Fibres, Sinew, and Tools (2019)
This is an abstract from the "HumAnE Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human relationships with animals include materials not just food. Animal products provide strong resistant materials for tools, and flexible ones for clothing and containers. Humans can wrap themselves and sleep warmer because they have turned animals into clothing, bedding and shelters. The tools made from them can enable hunting, food processing, and the preparation...
Materiality on the Margins of Empire: 19th Century Networks of British Trade and Exchange in Rural Ireland and Scotland. (2018)
How did people’s geographic position impact their access to material goods and necessities through trade and distribution within the 19th and early 20th century British world system? Throughout the 19th century an increasing distinction emerged between urban capitalist elites, the urban working poor, and a rural peasantry across Britain and Europe. While rural Ireland and Scotland were well connected to the urban economic centers of the United Kingdom, both nations were considered economically...
Measuring Success in the Jesuit Cause (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Jesuit Missions, Plantations, and Industries" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The site of Fort St. Joseph in southwest Michigan began as a mission in the 1680s when the Jesuits were granted a tract of land by the French crown along the St. Joseph River. For nearly a century a Jesuit priest tended to the souls of the Fort St. Joseph community. The presence of a marriage and baptism register testify to their religious...
Mediating Powers, Negotiating Inequalities: Ecological Politics at Cahokia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper,...
Memories of the Past and Its Impact in the Present: Conceptions and Misconception of the Irish Immigrant Experience in the United States (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alienating immigrant groups is not something unique to this generation. Immigrants to the United States, long before labeling human beings legal or illegal was commonplace, have been deemed either desirable or undesirable, moral or immoral, valued or value-less. Such categorizations have had a debilitating impact on the daily lives...
Memories of the Yeoman: the Moralized materiality of farming in the memory of rural New England (2016)
This paper focuses on the role of materiality and spatiality in the making of rural New England--a "historic place" with powerful resonances to the cultural identity of the United States. Rural New England was the site of 19th century historic preservation movements that sought to reclaim important objects and landscapes from material and social disintegration. Farming was integral to this construction, and the figure of the Yeoman was a frequently deployed categorical subjectivity, whose...
Motif and Milieu: Deconstructing the (Re)production of the Kura-Araxes Culture (3500-2400 BC) (2017)
How do material remains – and the imagery that adorns them – inform our understanding of past landscapes? How does knowledge of landscapes enrich our understanding of the objects produced within them? This paper explores the relationship between iconography and environment in the Early Bronze Age Kura-Araxes (3500-2400 BC) culture. The Kura-Araxes was arguably the most widespread archaeological horizon in the ancient Near East, extending from the Caucasus to the Levant to the Zagros Mountains....
Movement, Intersubjectivity, and Sensory Archaeology– Insights from Western Ireland (2018)
Movement is fundamental to bodily perception and to the formation of the archaeological record. Histories of movement shape our perceptual apparatus and generate embodied knowledge. This recursive constitution of bodies, movements, and materials simultaneously defines the challenge and opportunity of phenomenological approaches within sensory archaeology. Explicitly or not, most researchers use their own bodily experiences of movement as analogies for making inferences about the material and...
Mutable materials and gathering worlds (2015)
Owing to a plethora of recent and ever more divergent scholarship on materiality, the lens through which we view the ontological status of things has become increasingly opaque. New thinking about the ways in which materials are always and already in flux compels us to consider how seemingly obdurate things can, paradoxically, transcend their own solidity. To this we may add a budding concern with the immaterial – regimes of light and sound, for example, and their mutability – and the extent to...
Nature as Agent: Mass-Event, Incremental, and Biotic Perspectives (2018)
The recent development of the "Anthropocene" as a distinct geologic era, added to a century’s worth of scholarly discussion about the role of humans in their ecosystems, has solidified an interpretive view of humans as prime mover. Yet nature has a "mind of its own" relative to human knowledge, action, and volition. In this session, presenters will discuss the ways in which natural entities, ranging in size from mega-storms to viruses, have presented challenging conditions to which humans can...
Near-Surface Geophysics in Jicalán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Near-surface geophysics has been widely used as a tool to determine the distribution of objects at depth with archaeological targets. To identify more specific objects, such as ovens and associated structures, the...
New Manteños Social Spaces: The Materiality of Ligüiqui (Manabí, Ecuador) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The "Perduraciones" project, which has been taking place in the central area of the Ecuadorian coast since 2018, has focused part of their research on the characterization of the social space resulting from the process of articulating European colonization on the present coast of Ecuador during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In the...
Not Always Shiny and Pretty: The Darker Side of Obsidian in Symbolizing Power, Ethnicity and Inequality in Contemporary Ethiopia (2015)
This paper builds upon previous research among craftspeople of Southwestern Ethiopia who still procure obsidian on a regular basis to manufacture scrapers for the production of leather products. Previous ethnoarchaeological studies of these male and female hide workers of multiple ethnicities have provided a wealth of information on the role of lithics in past and present societies, and have been especially important in helping to debunk the idea that men were largely, if not exclusively...