Agency (Other Keyword)
1-25 (38 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In her 1997 book Scenes of Subjection, writer Saidiya Hartman examined the possibilities for resistance and transformation manifest in Black performance and everyday practice both pre and post-emancipation. Her examination is couched in a deep skepticism of the usefulness and relevance of agency in the study of slave power, questioning what...
Agency, Structure and the Neo-Liberal Turn (2017)
Recent theoretical over-emphasis on human agency and denial of the significance of socio-cultural structure presents a radical challenge to a century of research. It implies that Durkheim, Boas, Weber, etc., are irrelevant, and that long-standing structures of inequality (e.g., of gender or race) somehow do not exist or are not important. Examination of recent human-agency studies illustrates that, instead of studying human agency as action, interpretations are based on the kinds of structures...
An Analysis of Projectile Point Agency from the South Diamond Creek Pueblo Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an analysis of the projectile points recovered from the South Diamond Creek Pueblo (SDCP) site. This project took place over two summers in 2016 and 2017 and involved a salvage excavation of a Classic Mimbres pueblo. The excavation of the site yielded numerous intact projectile points in various contexts. By integrating a Behavioral...
Animal Agents in the Human Environment (2018)
Humans’ increasingly close relationship to animals constitutes one of the most important cultural, social, and economic developments of the past ten thousand years of our history, as well as being a key factor in the changes in climate referred to as the Anthropocene. Animals are important resources of food, labor, and secondary products in many societies, as well as symbolically important features of the ritual landscape. As relationships with animals intensify, processes such as domestication...
Apex, Arizona and the Myth of the Company Town in the American West (2024)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Company Towns are intrinsically linked to the labor of the American West. Yet such locations are invariably idealized by the industries that created them and villainized by the laborers exploited by them, as company towns both provided resources for their residents and controlled choices. Using...
Archaeologists In Parks (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Community Archaeology in 2020: Conventional or Revolutionary?" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. State and local natural resources and parks agencies have added archaeologists to their staffs in the decades since the passing of the National Historic Preservation Act. Archaeological professionals, like the author, were hired to help ensure compliance with Section 106 of NHPA and related provisions of the...
An Archaeology of Agency: The James and Sophia Clemens Farm (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the domestic architecture and material culture of the James and Sophia Clemens farm in Darke County, Ohio, United States. The Clemens were free persons of color in the early to mid-19th century, but their background was one of enslavement in Virginia. Their Antebellum Ohio farmstead is explored here as an...
The Children of the Ludlow Massacre: The Impact of Corporate Paternalism on Immigrant Children in Early 20th Century Colorado Coal Mining Communities. (2016)
Coal Miner’s lives in Southern Colorado were fraught with violence and hardships during the Coal Wars. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company attempted to assimilate ethnically diverse immigrant employees into American society. One of these methods was to impart American values to the children living in company towns. Archaeological work was conducted at the coal mining company town of Berwind, and at the Ludlow Massacre Tent Colony site. Using archaeological evidence and the historical record this...
The Chronicles of Storage and Everyday Ceramics: A Comparative Analysis of Pottery from Captive African and African American House Sites in Western Tennessee (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper will evaluate the storage and everyday use ceramic assemblages from two 19th-century captive house sites, Cedar Grove and Fanny Dickins. These sites are located within the modern 18,500 acre Ames land base in western Tennessee, which historically was one of the highest producing cotton areas in the US South. Since 2011,...
The "Colored Dead": African American Burying Grounds in a Confederate Stronghold (2018)
Some call Lexington, Virginia the place "where the South went to die": Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are buried there, along with countless Confederate soldiers. The extent to which the South truly expired is controversial, given for example the continuing, frequent presence of enthusiasts with gray uniforms and battle flags. How, in this context, have African Americans been memorialized? This paper considers marked and unmarked antebellum burials, Reconstruction-era graves, and...
Community and Agency in the early Neolithic of SW Asia (2015)
The accepted Neolithic narrative involves increasingly sedentary behavior within a context of villages composed of houses. Yet, although the novel way of life represented is given centre stage, there is little discussion of the nature of the communities that were developing, other than passing references to nuclear families, ancestor cults and the emergence of lineages and households. There is still less reference to human agency, with Neolithic people being buffeted around by a number of big...
"Constraint and Freedom" in the Era of Big Data (2017)
Twenty-seven years ago, Bruce Trigger presented a "new synthesis of archaeological explanation," seeking to harmonize neo-evolutionary explanations dominant in the 1970s with socio-historical perspectives of the 1980s. Central to his thesis was the distinction between "external" constraints that structure human agency independent of humans themselves, and "internal" constraints that are historically and culturally constructed. Here, I critique Trigger's formula by acknowledging that even...
Constructing Heritage for the Historic U-Lazy-S Ranch (2017)
Heritage as a cultural process is observed through three-layers: people, history, and landscapes. These layers are analyzed together to gain a holistic view of heritage construction at the historic U-Lazy-S Ranch located along the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado in northwestern Texas. This generational cattle ranch has been in operation for over 100 years. As ranching requires large tracts of land spread across the landscape, multiple sites must be examined and combined with documentary...
The Cultural Significance of Historic Bone Tools (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Artifacts are More Than Enough: Recentering the Artifact in Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Bone tools are commonly found on historic sites, but to date no one has discussed them, identified their makers, nor considered their uses. Without an interpretive framework, bone tools have fallen into a void and become a lost source of information. Recent investigations at a few...
The Dynamics of Small Things Remembered: Giving Voice to A Silenced Past (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Mary Beaudry’s impact on archaeology is immense and reaches all corners of the discipline. More than anything, it was her commitment to the individual and their ability to make meaningful choices throughout the course of everyday life. Ultimately, she created a dynamic landscape...
The emotive agency of infants and children in early Anglo-Saxon inhumation cemeteries (2016)
Infant and child graves have often received ambiguous interpretation when found in archaeological context. In 2012 a child’s grave was excavated in the sixth century cemetery at Oakington Cambridgeshire. Sometime after deposition its feet were truncated by a large adult grave, however, the child’s bones were repositioned on its legs, an action which impels continuing agency influencing the gravediggers long after the child had died and been buried. Child mortality was high in many past...
Examining Wangunk-Hollister Interactions Through Analysis of the Colonial Landscape and Indigenous Pottery (2018)
The first few decades of colonization in southern New England appear to have been markedly different from eighteenth-century colonialism in the region. Specifically, relationships and interactions between English settler-colonists and Indigenous peoples during this time seem to have been complex and characterized by reciprocity. Intersecting lines of evidence at the Hollister site support this, and indicate that complex relationships were fostered between the colonists occupying the site, and...
Framing Pattern and Shipwright Agency: Understanding the Uniformization of the French Navy in the Late 17th century (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "From the Bottom Up: Socioeconomic Archaeology of the French Maritime Empire" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Sunk in 1692 at the Battle of La Hougue during the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the wrecks of Saint-Philippe, Magnifique, Merveilleux, Foudroyant, and Ambitieux constituted what is considered to be the first navy of France. These ships were built by master shipwrights who were already seasoned...
From the Field to the Festival: Reading the Landscape of Cloth in Axum, Ethiopia (2017)
The city of Axum in northern Ethiopia is well known for its high quality, hand woven cloth. Sundays and festivals bring throngs of local people who, to the outside observer, appear to be uniformly dressed in beautiful white handspun clothing embellished with colourful woven borders and embroidery. This apparent uniformity belies a very complex set of activities that lead to the production, distribution and consumption of cloth in Axum. Each step in production is dominated by people of...
Gendering herding: an ethnoarchaeology of transhumant settlements in the west of Ireland (2017)
In much of Ireland, from early medieval times up to the 19th century, it was common practice to take livestock - cattle especially - up to the hills and mountains for the summer. This was a small-scale transhumance known as booleying, and involved the relocation of a minority of people with livestock to the upland areas. Here they lived in summer (booley) huts and tended to milch cows. The remains of these structures are now the best archaeological evidence of the practice ever taking place....
An Historical Archaeology of Minstrelsy (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "On the Centennial of his Passing: San Diego County Pioneer Nathan "Nate" Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For over a century, the accepted story of Nathan Harrison was that he was a charming yet anachronistic fool. Ironically, even though contradictory details of his pre-Palomar Mountain life were hotly debated, the narratives were in agreement when...
In Search of Agrarian Women in the Material Culture of the Post-bellum Sandhills (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Although World War I proved a boon for the suffrage movement, it resulted in the displacement of the agrarian communities of South Carolina’s Sandhills. Beginning in 1917, war preparations centered on the construction of Fort Jackson just outside of Columbia. As the Fort expanded, agrarian families across the Sandhills resisted development. This paper delves into the world of the...
The Localization of Taphonomy: The Impacts of Physical Environments and the Memorialization Practices of Local Populations on Combat Loss Archaeological Sites (2017)
The taphonomic processes that affect archaeological remains in a given location are some of the most significant factors to be taken into consideration when assessing the type and amount of information potentially recoverable from an archaeological site. These processes vary widely based upon geographic region. Human agency as a taphonomic process has similar geographically and culturally-based variability. Through remembrance, memorialization, and commemoration, or lack thereof, to include...
A Military Site Case Study of Agency and Practice (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Military Sites" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The military is a hierarchically organized social network defined by rules and regulations, but it is through agency and practice that its structure is actuated. Despite expectations of conformity and uniformity of actions, significant variability in agency occurs. Agents in a military context possessed shared practice, evident in martial drills, use of weapons, and...
Monumental Biographies: Structure and Agency in European Hillfort Construction (2015)
European hillforts contrast greatly in scale and complexity, and different regions of the continent have experienced varied historiographies of research. Using a few key examples to illustrate the different approaches to hillfort monumentality, this paper addresses the contrasting emphases on function and meaning seen in such studies. Particular focus will be placed on three aspects, through the theoretical lens of structure and agency: the role of earthwork construction in the creation of...