Materiality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Emmanuel Salazar Chavez. Cuauhtemoc Vidal-Guzman. Jeffrey Blomster.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Van Dyke.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Kovacevich.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Bragdon.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meredith S Chesson.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Hurcombe. Theresa Emmerich Kamper.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Morrow.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebekah Planto.

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Home to Virginia’s oldest standing house, the Bacon’s Castle site is the most visible remnant of a (post)colonial landscape, continuously occupied as such since at least the 1640s. The extant portion alone, where archaeology has concentrated, has been inhabited over multiple generations by a complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only María J. Novelo Pérez. Daniela González Chablé. Lilia Fernández Souza.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Balché is a ritual beverage elaborated with honey and tree bark that, during many centuries, has been fundamental for Maya religious rituals in Yucatán, as documented in precolumbian codices, historical sources, and ethnographic research. Some information at the Madrid Codex indicates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Nassaney. José António Brandão.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Brighton.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Quentin P Lewis.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cristian Ramirez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will contextualize the diverse range of materials found in several shaft tombs throughout West Mexico. I argue that there are examples of ontological ecologies connected to animals and the seasons by understanding the connections between the landscape and the materials found in the tombs. I explore how the metamorphoses of several animals such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabrielle Borenstein.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watts.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Long.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the Summer of 2023, I traveled to Cortez, Colorado to participate in a lab internship at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center. I was given the opportunity to conduct a personal project dealing with a set type of artifacts of my own choosing. For my project, I decided to look at the gaming pieces from the Haynie site (5MT1905). My goal for this project was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica L. Smith.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Cifuentes. Yosselin Angeles. Andres Tejero. Mario Retiz.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Castro-Priego. Lauro Olmo-Enciso. Marcos Octavio Labrada Ochoa.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Brandt.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darryl Wilkinson.

Power depends on certain modes of relation between people and things; a fact archaeologists have recognized for some time. Thus there can be no states or rulers without monuments, elite regalia, official iconographies and the like—although traditionally it is only the human component that has been seen as the active element in this equation. More recently, archaeologists have sought to reconsider humans not as the users of things, but as their partners and co-participants in the social. In this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Chavez.

This paper explores roles played by objects in forging and cementing local and state identities at a Tiahuanaco cemetery at Cundisa in Copacabana, Bolivia. The cemetery consists of 98 Tiahuanaco burials excavated by the Yaya-Mama Archaeological Project. The majority of tombs contain a single individual. Most of the complete objects associated with these burials belong to classic Tiahuanaco style of decorated pottery, but there is also another peculiar pattern of unfired clay miniatures and large...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Brzezinski. Vanessa Monson. Arthur Joyce. Sarah Barber.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent ontological turn in archaeological research has resulted in a proliferation of theoretical approaches inspired by non-representational and non-anthropocentric scholarship. In relational ontologies such as those of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, objects could possess a life force that allowed them to engage with other animate beings, to animate other...