Materiality (Other Keyword)
176-182 (182 Records)
Water and the making of authority has generally been viewed as a basic metabolic need whose capture and distribution provides a nexus through which power flows. The household becomes place of water consumption where subjectification was achieved in other domains and subsequently inscribed into the container. In this paper I take a slightly different approach. Specifically I ask the question, at what point does water become a convenience and how does its status as a convenience inflect both...
What does their Storage say about Them? An interpretation of domestic storage practices at the Classic Period Maya village of Ceren (2015)
Around A.D. 650 the Loma Caldera eruption entombed the Classic Period Maya village of Cerén in 4-6 meters of volcanic ash. This resulted in the exceptional preservation of structures, artifacts and botanical remains, providing archaeologists with a unique opportunity to study the household complexes and their related activities. However, much of the previous research concerning the households at Cerén has primarily focused on its economic activities. As a result, archaeologists have yet to...
What is It? Doing Bioarchaeology with Matter (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future of Bioarchaeology in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. To know and to name bodies and their parts, bioarchaeologists rely on intimate encounters with material traces. At times, they closely examine the "same" objects, yet see quite different things. Understanding such difference is usually treated epistemologically. People have alternative vantage points on the same reality, and divergent...
What’s an (Archaeological) Peasant? Notes on Rural Subjectivities in Atlantic Africa (2015)
This paper explores rural communities’ historical relationships to state authority in the Siin province (Senegal). I engage with classic literature to examine how the concept of ‘peasant’ might be relevant to archaeological realities in Senegal’s countryside during the Atlantic era, and how it might helpful to think about political identity among social actors chronically understudied (and under-documented) in the African past. I am interested in the term as one way to conceptualize the...
Who/What Is In That Vial? (2018)
Archaeologists typically conceptualize the "material" in an integrated analysis of material culture and biological data as artifacts/objects/things recovered through excavation from an historic mortuary setting. However, further explorations of meaning are possible when the definition of material encompasses both what is recovered and produced by archaeologists. Destructive testing, as a component of bioarchaeological analysis, creates additional materialized relationships between the living and...
Writing the Archaeology of America's Modern Cities (2013)
Over the last few decades, archaeologists have contributed a great deal to our understanding of contemporary American cities. We have just finished writing a book about the work these colleagues have done, based on material they have provided from all over the country, mostly from the grey literature. Their archaeological investigations are informative at two scales of analysis. Some studies, on the macro scale, have encompassed the whole city, and reveal patterns of urban development, ...
The YEAR Centre: A Research-Driven Pedagogical Approach to Experimental Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, since the development of our outdoor experimental archaeology “lab” (York Experimental Archaeological Research “YEAR” Centre, University of York) we have designed a series of modules that place experiential learning at the center of pedagogical practice. Such is the success of these modules we now...