Personhood (Other Keyword)
1-11 (11 Records)
Solar-powered bulbs and flapping-winged ladybugs, wind chimes, whirligigs, jack-o-lanterns, valentines to the deceased, and much else adorn gravesites in the Valley of Virginia. A 2003 bowling trophy sits on the headstone of a person who died in 2001. A stuffed rabbit faces another stone and holds recent photos of children, as if showing them to the buried teen. These objects relate not only to the deceased’s personal histories and interests but also represent gestures, through exchange and...
Grave Anatomy: Dissecting Bodies of Meaning in Historical North American Burials (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Materialities of (Un)Freedom: Examining the Material Consequences of Inequality within Historical Archaeology", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, changes in philosophical and medical knowledge resulted in new relationships between the living and the dead in the Western world. This resulted in new strategies of deciding who was part of a community and how best to...
In Death Do We Join: Community Building in Ancient Ethiopian Funerary Practices (2015)
Aksum was the capital of northern Ethiopian kingdom that is famous for its numerous pre-Christian funerary stelae dating to the first four centuries A.D. The six largest stelae employ a peculiar "house" symbolism carved into their surfaces. Art historians have also noted that later Christian churches in the Ethiopian highlands, also sites for burial, mimic the layouts of old Aksumite elite houses. Beyond this, there has been little serious interpretation on what the "house" symbolism indicates...
Maya Pilgrimage to Interactive Places: Human Bones in Caves at Mensabak, Chiapas (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation focuses on the anthropology of pilgrimage as a journey to places outside of everyday realms. For Maya societies, pilgrimages are important for maintaining the relationships between people and nonhuman persons linked to the ritual landscape. In this context, the presence of human bones in caves around the lakes at...
Mortuary Theatrics and Chiefly Power in Panama and Costa Rica (2016)
This paper explores the mechanisms by which sumptuary art was deposited in mortuary contexts in parts of southern Central America. Rather than signal the existence of ”eliteness” or chiefly office, it is argued that the production and procurement of mortuary art was one feature of a factionalized political landscape. The burial of staggering quantities of this artwork may be interpreted as deflationary attempts to limit the capital available to rivals. Such practices may have promoted a...
Native Mortuary Customs and Knowledge Networks in 18th-Century Massachusetts (2013)
This paper looks at wills written by and for Wampanoag people in their own language and in English and their relation to other native mortuary customs in the eighteenth century. I argue that while writing wills was an innovative practice adopted by Christian Indians and suggests a breakdown in native community structure in the eighteenth century, the practice was consistent with other evidence for strong community identification. Knowledge of the "writing culture" of southern New...
Network Approaches to Cosmopolitanism in Ancient Ethiopia (50-700 AD) (2017)
This paper looks at how ideas of cosmopolitanism can be applied to the African context using Aksum (50-700 AD) in northern Ethiopia as case study. While there is much interest in issues of cosmopolitanism, or the making of a "world citizen" or a "world community" as drawn from 18th-19th century conceptualizations, such issues become difficult to study on the African continent given the strong emphasis on personhoods configured around local, corporate contexts. Burial practices from ancient Aksum...
Osteobiography as Local Biology (2017)
Osteobiography is an increasingly popular approach, but one that can have the effect of producing unproblematised, individualised approaches to the life course. In this paper I wish to explore how we can create a theoretically informed osteobiography. I propose two strands to this. Firstly, rather than osteobiography being something that ‘happens to’ individuals living in a society, I suggest that it constantly emerges through inter-relations with culturally specific understandings of the person...
Persons and Mortuary Practices in the Native Northeast (2015)
The incorporation of the dead into the social practices of the living – as revealed by mortuary practices in the Native Northeast – is especially relevant to current archaeological theories of materiality, value, and consumption. This paper presents comparative data from southern New England Algonquian and northern Iroquoian societies to argue that mass burials (including ossuaries and cemeteries) typical of sixteenth and seventeenth century Northeastern aboriginal societies reflected new...
Processing Personhood: Mortuary Activity from the Middle to Late Woodland in the Lower Illinois River Valley (2018)
While archaeological engagement with the body as a locus of embodied agency has proliferated in recent years, this study is the first to rigorously apply theories of personhood to the lengthy burial rituals documented within interment facilities of Woodland burial mounds from the North American Midcontinent. This study aims to explore conceptions of the body, dividuality, embodiment, and personhood through the analysis of skeletal material from the Middle Woodland Gibson Mounds Site (n=19) and...
Stone Bodies and Second Lives: Preserving the Person in Ancient Ethiopia (2016)
Aksum, the capital of an ancient northern Ethiopian kingdom (50-700 AD), is well known for its elaborate funerary stelae, the largest of which were carved in the impression of multi-storied “houses.” Prior to a widespread conversion to Christianity, the Aksumites buried their dead in kin-groups either in tombs or in shafts that cluster around the stelae. Human remains are often burned, fragmentary, disarticulated and jumbled, creating an impression of ephemeralness that contrasts with the...