contact period (Other Keyword)
1-25 (327 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The primary serving vessel at the sixteenth-century Spanish colonial site of Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, is an indigenously produced brimmed plate made in the form of Italianate majolica. These vessels were produced in a Mesoamerican technological tradition and were painted with a modified version of designs found on pre-Hispanic Pipil pottery in southeastern...
The Acolman Cross and the Maize God (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monastery of Acolman founded by the Augustinian order is located near Teotihuacan. The most astonishing tequitqui (Amerindian-Christian art of the sixteenth century) monument in Acolman is the atrial cross made in 1550. Although open-air crosses existed in Europe, the Mexican crosses have a different iconography...
Across a Threshold: The Columbian Exchange in the Land of Tiguex (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Columbian Exchange Revisited: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Eurasian Domesticates in the Americas" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In August 1540 Hernando de Alvarado, a member of the Coronado expedition, entered what he termed “the province of Tiguex” (today known as the Middle Rio Grande Valley of Central New Mexico), kicking off several centuries of socioeconomic transformation. As a case...
Acting, Reacting, and Entangling at the Edge of the Spanish Colony: Maya Life at Progresso Lagoon, Belize in the Context of Colonization (2018)
The Maya of northern Belize were located at the edge of the Spanish colony, far from the Spanish capital at Merida, and visited only occasionally by encomenderos and priests. How much of Maya life then was a reaction to Spanish colonization? The archaeological data from Progresso Lagoon, Belize suggest that most contact and colonial period material culture at the Maya community was shaped by ongoing Maya political and economic processes, rather than by Spanish intervention. In addition, Maya...
The Aftermath of Colonization: Wichita Subsistence Change in the Southern Plains (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. European colonization of North America had profound impacts on Native American populations. These include the introduction of European diseases and warfare, the consolidation and abandonment of traditional lands, and the eventual forced relocation to reservations. Previously, much archaeological focus has been on the demographic, social, and political...
The Agency of Flowing Water in Human Mobility and Interaction (2018)
Water is one of the most powerful agents of change on the planet. Flowing water can build and destroy landscapes rapidly in dramatic fashion as with flash flooding or gradually through incremental natural processes, shaping the terrain through sedimentation, erosion, and seasonal fluctuations in water flow. Within human societies, these waterways may be perceived as a source of danger, but also provide subsistence and non-subsistence resources, and serve as landscape features that alter how...
Algonquian Landscapes and Multispecies Archaeology in the Chesapeake (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Silenced Rituals in Indigenous North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to places with deep histories throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Algonquian groups traveled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and...
All Is Never Lost: Examining Coalescence, Cultural Resilience, and Survivance in the Archaeology of a Protohistoric Village on the Arkansas River (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often approach the contact period in the Americas, and subsequent upheavals, with a sense of melancholy at a world supplanted in our own becoming. While contact and the ensuing centuries of colonization certainly brought trauma, significant loss, and destabilization to Indigenous cultures, the experiences of Native people of this period need...
Alterity, Resistance, and Autonomy: Mortuary Archaeology and the Diversity of Indigenous Responses to Spanish Conquest in Lambayeque, Peru (2018)
Over the last few decades, archaeological narratives have shifted towards far more nuanced understandings of colonized peoples in favor of reconstructing nuanced and integrated understandings of indigenous perception, identity, biosocial interplays, and other responses to conquest. This work merges archaeological, ecological, and bioarchaeological contexts to help understand the significance of mortuary pattern data to compare postcontact cultural outcomes in Mórrope and Eten, two...
Ambiguous Archaeology: Eating and Ceramic Styles in the Early Modern Caribbean (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper underscores “ambiguity” and duality as pervasive factors in archaeological research through a case study of coarse earthenware from La Soye, Dominica. Within this framework, I concentrate my approach on syncretic foodways and ceramic productions, which blend, confound, and subvert straight-forward interpretations. Using the material culture as a...
Ambivalence and Apostasy at the Sixteenth century Visita Town of Hunacti, Yucatan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of three Maya elite houses and a visita church at Hunacti reveal the mixed material signatures expected of a community deeply ambivalent to Spanish rule, strongly attracted to and at the same time repulsed by Spaniard house styles, Christian doctrine, and European goods. In a rural location at a distance from Franciscan...
Analyzing the Utilization of Shell in Chickasaw Pottery Using Petrographic and Chemical Composition Techniques (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological and ethnographic records indicate that a change in ceramic technology from recent shell to fossil shell temper took place as the contact period Chickasaw of Mississippi migrated north and adjusted to upland settlements of the Blackland Prairie. While this shift is widely accepted within the archaeology of the region, it can be difficult to apply...
Ancestral Chickasaw Migration and the Makings of the Anthropocene in Southeastern North America (2018)
We describe recent investigations of Indigenous communities who vacated the Tombigbee drainage of eastern Mississippi in the mid-fifteenth century A.D. These and surrounding groups migrated into nearby uplands known as the Blackland Prairie. Populations continued to move northward within the prairie and coalesced around what is today Tupelo, MS, in the 1600s. The move from a riverine to upland setting involved a dramatic shift in practices of historical ecology. The rich soils and open terrain...
Ancient DNA from Campeche, Mexico, Reveals a Socially Segregated Population in the First Two Centuries after Hispanic Contact (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonial period in Mexico was an unprecedented time when previously disparate populations began living together under Hispanic leadership and Catholic faith, often unwillingly. Immediately after the conquest, Spanish colonists established urban strongholds, often bringing African slaves and servants with them. In these...
Archaeological Investigations At La Isabela, Dominican Republic (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Plus Ultra: An examination of current research in Spanish Colonial/Iberian Underwater and Terrestrial Archaeology in the Western Hemisphere." , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Indiana University (IU) is assisting the Dominican Republic in the assessment of terrestrial and underwater archaeological components of La Isabela settlement. Founded in 1494 by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage, the medieval...
An Archaeological Perspective on Oral Traditions, Regarding Migration, of the Northern Caddoan Speaking Tribes (2018)
Affiliating prehistoric archaeological sites with contemporary indigenous communities in American archaeology is often met with skepticism and criticism. As a means for overcoming the inherent criticism; I utilize the oral traditions, regarding migration, of the Northern Caddoan speaking tribes as a means to construct a relative chronology for which these populations moved across the landscape in prehistory. Then I compare the relative chronology with the archaeological record. By comparing site...
Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Sahuaripa Region of Eastern Sonora (2018)
There is little doubt that there exists cultural continuity linking the Río Sonora tradition and the Ópata (a term referring to an amalgamation of several groups, generally including Eudeve, Teguima and Jova-cf. Yetman 2010; Spicer 1962). The socio-political organization of the late prehispanic Rio Sonora archaeological tradition remains controversial though little studied. Carroll Riley (1982, 1987, 1999, 2005; see also Doolittle 1984, 1988, 2008) proposed that they constitute "statelets",...
The Archaeology of Indigenous-European Interaction at LaSoye 2, Dominica, a Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Trading Settlement (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, storm surges from Hurricane Maria exposed evidence of an early European colonial settlement on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Subsequent survey and testing established the site as a trading settlement, dating from the sixteenth until eighteenth century, a period of dynamic change in the Caribbean. The site is located on the coastline of an...
Archival Oral Histories, Intellectual Property, and the Indigenous Community: The Legacy of Mary Kiona, “Grand Matriarch” of the Upper Cowlitz (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archival collections of Native language oral histories are widely scattered among universities, museums, and tribal repositories throughout the Pacific Northwest region. Many of these oral histories are an important primary source of information relative to traditional Indigenous land-use practices, in turn critical to an understanding of the...
Arqueología histórica del colonialismo en contextos insulares: Chiloé y su jurisdicción (siglos XVI-XVIII) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Archaeology of the Southern Cone" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los principales núcleos urbanos y fortificaciones en Chiloé coexistieron con un centenar de asentamientos, llamados pueblos de indios, desde la fundación de Santiago de Castro en 1567. Desde ese momento, la dinámica de relaciones interétnicas habría incidido en la conformación del sistema colonial...
Assembling Infrastructure, Detotalizing Communities: Provincial Infrastructure as Situated History and Landscape in British Columbia (2018)
Investigation of the material, spatial and temporal distributedness of large-scale, infrastructure projects holds significant potential to lay bare histories of underlying political rationales and practices that challenge overtly utilitarian narratives of public welfare and economic good. This paper investigates the differential experience and perception of a sample of state-initiated or sanctioned infrastructure projects (e.g., Hydro power lines and substations, pipelines, highways and...
Assimilation, Acculturation, and Individual Agency in a Coastal Gabrielino Village (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts suggest that the Gabrielino were a complex hunter-gatherer society similar to their Chumash neighbors. They had a rich and elaborate material culture and a ranked society with a chiefly class. Building upon previous research on Chumash burial grounds, we report the results of an intensive multi-year study of a Gabrielino village and...
Authority via Mobility: Interpreting Yamasee Ceramics (2018)
Yamasees worked as non-missionized laborers in Spanish Florida, raided for Charleston traders, fought to expand Georgia, lived with Creek Indians, and worked as diplomats and traders in Pensacola. Letters, speeches, and testimony demonstrate that this mobility— often leading them to outnumber local occupants— allowed Yamasees to dictate terms to and take vengeance against other Native Americans as well as Europeans. Despite such authority, pottery assemblages demonstrate the frequent adoption of...
Baubles, Bangles and Beads: The Role of Personal Adornments in a 17th Century Spanish Mission Period Community (2018)
More than a decade of archaeological investigations at Mission San Joseph de Sapala and its associated Guale village of Sapala on Sapelo Island, Georgia have provided significant new insights into the nature of Spanish-Guale interaction and negotiation. Some of these cultural transactions are reflected by items of clothing or personal adornment that were worn by the Spanish and/or Native Americans who lived in that 17th century Spanish Mission community. This poster explores the nature of...
Belongings as Archives: An Abundant Approach to Sugpiaq Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The historian Tiya Miles argues for an abundant approach to history, in which researchers learn to excavate absences in the historical record instead of allowing those silences to stand. Belongings (a.k.a. artifacts or objects) are additional archives that contain the stories, energies, and contexts in which they were made and used. As part of my work with...