Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Janusek.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Heather Law Pezzarossi.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch. Makena Lurie.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Elizabeth Grávalos. Emily A. Sharp.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleni Hasaki.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have long debated the size of workforce in a niche industry of decorated ceramics in ancient Athens (600-400 BC) by using a variety of proxies mostly relying on the finished products themselves. In this paper I offer a bottom-up approach by calculating the time investment involved in potting and painting decorated wares. Far from a sprint race,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Montgomery.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Phelps.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Lorenc.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Stull.

This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The theoretical foundation of experimental archaeology is often left implicit. Some argue that the primary value of experimental archaeology lies in scientific experiments to investigate specific and non-theoretical questions about ancient technology. This paper will address the experiential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tamara L Bray.

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...

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 Rosemary Joyce.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Geological materials that constitute features in archaeological sites in Central America range from unfired clay and unmodified cobbles, to cut stone, and plasters produced by heating limestone. What these materials have in common is that from an archaeological...

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 Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool. Brandon Massullo.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human cognition both enables and limits the ways humans can interact with spirits and forces that are typically unseen or that otherwise transcend the physical world. Research in psychology, anthropology, and related fields indicates that social and physical contexts are central to activating the cognitive frameworks that facilitate spirit-human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Pezzarossi.

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Gateways to Future Historical Archaeology in Mexico and Central America", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. As noted the uncertain position of historical archaeology in Mesoamerica, particularly in Guatemala, has reified the divide between prehispanic and later colonial native histories in the region. At the same time, the archaeology of the recent/contemporary is especially neglected, obfuscating how...

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...