artifact agency (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Walker. Chadwick K. Burt.

Since the enlightenment western approaches to material culture have distinguished between natural and supernatural processes. This demarcation produces archaeological perspectives at odds with ethnographically known cultures and likely past ones. Contemporary Native American ontologies emphasize the animacy of things such as architecture and pottery. An important theoretical question therefore, is what social relationships did people establish with material objects, and how did these...