Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
426-448 (448 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Largely assumed to consist of a male-dominated workforce and clientele, many early Oregon breweries were actually family affairs. The Eagle Brewery and Saloon, one of the first breweries in Oregon, was run by German immigrants Joseph and Fredericka Wetterer. They sold lager beer, distilled whisky and brandy, and had a small vineyard on their property. Upon...
Wealth and Ownership of Indigenous Goods among Spanish Colonizers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have debated the relationship between ownership of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers and different economic, cultural, and social variables. Some argue that wealth had a strong impact on consumption patterns, and wealthy colonizers used more European imports and less...
What Archaeologists Can’t See: contrasting ethnohistorical and archaeological data in Talamanca, Costa Rica in the 16th century (2018)
Archaeologist Francisco Corrales and myself recently undertook the study of the exploitation of natural resources and their exchange in the areas close to Juan Vázquez de Coronado´s route in 1564, traced from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean in Southeastern and Southwestern Costa Rica. This presentation aims to underline how resources of the different altitudes on both slopes formed an important part of the various activities carried out by the inhabitants during the 16th. century and...
What Happened at Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan: Archaeological Finds from the Berry Site in Western North Carolina (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Between 1566 and 1568, expeditions led by Captain Juan Pardo sought to establish permanent Spanish colonial towns and forts along an overland route connecting Santa Elena, the capital of La Florida, in coastal South Carolina, with New Spain and the rich silver mines near Zacatecas, Mexico. Written accounts chronicle the movements of...
What Is ‘Good Hair’? – Personhood, Ritual, and Resurgence of Bodily Adornment among the Equestrian Blackfoot (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. Painting and writing from Fort Union Trading Post, North Dakota in the 1830s, George Catlin greatly admired Plains Indian coifs, body paint, and insignia, painstakingly describing each individual’s appearance. Contemporary descendants of Blackfoot warriors whom Catlin painted, joyfully display their portraits as evidence of the...
What the Old Ones Have to Teach Us (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses two important directions in archaeology today. The first is the urge to better-incorporate Native views and interests into archaeological practice; and the second is the urge to make the results of archaeology more useful for the present and future. I suggest that a...
What’s Really Important in the Ethnohistory of Sonora? (2018)
Analysis of Contact Era ethno-historical accounts has played an outsized role in the interpretation of protohistoric Sonora, Mexico. Controversy surrounds interpretations, owing to incongruities between archaeological and textual data as well as disagreements over how to weight the disparate observations made in these documents. Modern researchers variably evaluate the biases, motives, and the overall truthfulness of the authors of these documents. Another issue is the general subjectivity...
When Irish Eyes View Maya Classic Period Political Systems (2018)
Several debates have endured for decades within the field of anthropological archaeology as to the character of lowland Classic period Maya political organization. Scholars have been struck by the contrast between Maya regal-ritual centers possessed of impressive monumental architecture with the minimal references from the documentary record to any kind of bureaucratic organization. There is disagreement as to the scale of the larger Maya polities and whether or not some polities had begun to...
When Is a Horse Not a Horse? It Depends on Your Local Ecology (2018)
The (re)introduction of the horse to North America brought dramatic changes to American Indians. However, not all populations were affected equally; the horse became central to some societies, but had seemingly little effect on others. This variation is seen across Great Basin ethnographic groups, where some populations adopted the horse for transportation and hunting, while others ignored or even ate the horse. Some argue that this variation is the result of environmental constraints: where the...
Whenever the Twain Shall Meet: Merging Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Data (2018)
Data sources, including documentary and archaeological, represent rich caches, full of mundane descriptions and an occasional succulent morsel that adds to the richness of our understanding of the past or potentially changes those understandings in fundamental ways. Yet facts are situated in frameworks of conventional wisdom, existing reconstructions, methodological practice, and extant data. Many substantial advances effectively and critically combine the particular with the generalizable,...
Where Have All the Collections Gone? Mexican Archaeology in World Museums (2018)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, before the era of professional archaeology, those interested in the evidence of the past collected, and on an unprecedented scale. Most of these massive holdings have been since acquired by public museums around the world, where they have been co-mingled with other collections, and in the process, objects have been severed from their historic moorings. Focusing on Mexican collections, this talk looks back on a decade of work in museums and archives...
Where No Mestiza Has Gone Before: Brokering Colonialism, Ethnogenesis, and Gendered Landscapes in Alta California, 1775-1845 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The triple consciousness that is the Afro-Mestiza or Mestizo experience conjures nationalism, racialization, and ethnicity and thereby, the ongoing negotiation of identity on the Spanish and Mexican borderlands frontier. Where archaeology and historical studies are concerned, the effort to interrogate the lives of mestiza women within such contested landscapes is...
Where Text Meets Trowel: Using an Integrative Approach to Consider Internal Sociopolitical Dynamics at Postclassic Etlatongo (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca is fortunate to have an impressive corpus of pre- and postconquest ethnohistorical sources that have been the focus of intensive academic scrutiny. Yet, emphasis on these sources provides an incomplete picture where only the histories of polities mentioned in the texts are taken as central, often to...
Where the River Flows: Water Politics and Textile Production in Colonial Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water is intrinsically linked to textile production. The dye process requires a substantial amount of water to acquire a consistent and proper color. Colonial textile mills, known as obrajes, were strategically built near bodies of water for this reason. Obrajes significantly shaped colonial water politics. Their presence on the water changed waterscapes, or...
Why the Chimu State of the Northern Coast of Peru Failed: Rapid Expansion Is Not Always Enough (2018)
In the last 1000 years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532, the expansionist states of the Andean region of Peru—like those of the Old World--appear to have grown incrementally, flourished briefly, and disappeared. Despite intensive study in the 1970’s and since, the inner structure and dynamics of Chimor have eluded archaeologists because there is limited information from European observers and because there are many questions archaeologists have not yet addressed. At its maximum, Chimor...
Wickiups as Placemaking: Contemporary Landscape Archaeology in the Mountains of Northern New Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines how wickiups—light, compact wooden structures common across many times and places in the American Mountain West—reflect the conception and use of contemporary mountain landscapes. Landscape archaeology allows us to understand how people’s actions and experiences transform the physical environment from an abstract space to a...
William J. Folan and the Climate Fascination (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We recall the moment that William J. Folan was struck by the Climate Fascination. In 1978 he had a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio and we were sharing an office. He suggested that JDG should do an article on Maya Lowlands climate change. JDG responded that Willie was the expert who...
William J. Folan's Canadian Contributions to Archaeology and Ethnohistory (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although most recognize William Folan’s contributions to Mayan archaeology, his early career was devoted to significant national heritage projects in Canada. From 1965 to 1972, Willie carried out two unprecedented large archaeological projects for Parks Canada. It was a ground-breaking time in Canadian archaeology,...
The Witching Hour: Demonization of Female Bodies and the (mis)Construction of Gender during the Spanish Evangelization of Huarochirí (Lima, Peru) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1660, Francisca Melchora, widow of the lord of the Huarochirí people in the Viceroyalty of Peru, became immersed in a witchcraft criminal case. However, she was not accused of being a witch herself, but instead of hiding accused women and resisting a Spanish lieutenant sent to...
Women Who Create and Feed the Gods: Female Priestly Work in Mesoamerica and the Andean Area (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...
Women’s Power and Prestige in the Pre-Hispanic and Early Colonial Andes (2018)
The second half of the first millennium A.D. witnessed some significant changes in gender roles and traditions in the Andes. The discovery of the first undisturbed burial context of fifty-eight noblewomen with hundreds of precious artifacts found at Castillo de Huarmey provides important evidence about women and their roles played in ancient society in the Wari Empire. The amount and the richness of the luxury and prestige items, which comprise hundreds of objects of the most diversified types,...
Xmucane and Her Granddaughters: Maya Women as Creators of Time (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Women in Mesoamerican Ritual" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Popol Vuh, the creation of the world and humankind is conceptualized as a process of birth. The old creator couple Xmucane and Xpiyacoc are described as the first diviners, just like their counter parts Oxomoco and Cipactonal who are the first calendar priests in Central Mexican mythology. This paper explores the relation between human...
Yet Another Tale of Two Cities: Santiago en Almolonga and San Salvador in the Early Sixteenth Century (2018)
The first Spanish foothold in Guatemala took root during the first invasion of Guatemala led by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524 at the Kaqchikel city of Iximche. Historians regard this as the first capital of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. After its location at Iximche, Santiago had two sequential locations near Olintepeque and in Chimaltenango. The ruins of the first permanent Santiago de Guatemala, founded in 1527 in the Valley of Almolonga and destroyed in 1541, lie beneath the modern...