Practice theory (Other Keyword)
1-11 (11 Records)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Throughout the development of nautical archaeology, the debate about defining terminology of individual ship timbers, how each ship was originally conceptualized, and when and why changes in construction methodology took place continue with the discipline. Over the last three decades, archaeologists Patrice Pomey and Eric Rieth...
Ancient Maya Elite Political-Economic Practices at La Milpa North, Northwestern Belize (2015)
Archaeological research has increasingly revealed the role of elite labor and influence in ancient Maya political economies. Rising awareness of the complexity of ancient Maya socioeconomic organization and attention to households as loci of production has led to new understandings of the structures and practices of production within elite households and the position of elite individuals in relations of production that extend beyond their households. Status-enhancing material goods of elite...
The Consequences of State Collapse: Evidence from the San Lucas Neighborhood during the Terminal Classic (2017)
Understanding the growth and dissolution of state entities has long been a topic of anthropological inquiry. More recently, archaeologists are promulgating dynamic and careful conceptions of how leaders acquire power, and whether and why surrounding residents may support them. By turning our attention to the political economic relationship between Maya rulers and the local population, we can identify successful and failed attempts to maintain states. In this paper, I combine political...
The faces behind the façade: monuments and their associated practices in Neolithic Britain (2015)
Over the last forty years the analysis of monuments has lain at the center of our understanding of Neolithic societies. Interpretative approaches toward monuments range in scale from the overarching view of Renfrew’s emerging chiefdoms to embodied perspectives focusing on their materiality. Regardless of analytical scale, most accounts treat monuments as complete architectural forms and fail to grasp the significance of the wider activities that surrounded their construction and use. This paper...
Midnight Madness in Mesoamerica: Dark Doings in the Ancient World (2016)
After the sun went down, the world of ancient Mesoamerica was transformed into a dark landscape. Some sought sleep while others came alive for nocturnal naughtiness. Ancient Mesoamericans simultaneously embraced and respected the dark. Are nightly practices destined to remain obscured from our view, or can we illuminate such dark doings by expanding our focus from daily practices to include those of the night? A fundamental question explored in this paper is the extent to which there is material...
The Need for Practice Theory in Unusual Monumental Architecture: A Residential Comparative Analysis (2015)
The recognition of different activities through ceramic analysis is critical to understanding the uses of formal architecture, but little functional analysis has been done to date in the "guachimonton" architecture commonly interpreted as temples. A previous study of the ceramics from guachimonton Circle 5 at the site of Navajas, Jalisco, provided evidence for aggrandizing rituals, group feasting, and daily domestic activities and helped to develop a model relating ceramic wares and types to...
A New approach to warfare (2015)
Lines of evidence, such as weapons, skeletal remains of victims of trauma, iconography, fortifications, etc., that are typically used to argue for the presence or absence of warfare in a society are often ambiguous. As a result researchers frequently reach contradicting conclusions from the same data. In situations where there are few material remains this problem is magnified making conclusions about warfare hard to come to. I put forward a new approach to the discussion of warfare that shifts...
New Perspectives on Warfare in the Iron Age of Wessex (2018)
Wessex, a region of southern England, has been the subject of more study than almost any other region of the UK. While much excavation has focused on the Iron Age little work has focused on the role of warfare at that time. Discussions of warfare have led to antithetical conclusions by researchers utilizing the same material with much of the disagreement stemming from fundamentally different interpretations of equivocal evidence and assumptions about life in the period. Some of this is...
The Politics of Practice Theory: Feminist Archaeology Meets Marx and Bourdieu (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In his influential book Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation, Charles Orser provided arguably the clearest and most powerful explanation of the usefulness of Bourdieu’s practice theory for historical archaeologists. Despite the use of practice theory for more than two...
Understanding the Ritual of Peri-abandonment Deposit Behavior Evidenced by Late Classic Maya Figurines at the Site of Baking Pot, Cayo District, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project is an archaeological field school operating in the Cayo District of Western Belize and has excavated at multiple sites in Belize annually since 1988. In the past five years, the project has focused on excavation of peri-abandonment deposits, or deposits of artifacts built up during and after the...
Understandings of Household Architecture at Night in the Middle Chamelecón Drainage, Honduras (2017)
Interpretations of Mesoamerican households tend to focus on activities that might rightly be associated with daylight hours and mostly informed by material culture that is moveable and multipurpose. However, intensive examinations of the non-movable or architectural composition of household settings have recently revealed even more about these diverse and socially complex domestic spaces. This examination initiates an analysis of the interaction between humans and their built-environment as it...