Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
1-25 (583 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will analyze the architectural changes of an 18th-century defensive tower called a Torreon, located in Dixon, New Mexico—previously known as the buffer community Embudo. Acting as community protection against Plains Indians during Hispanic settlement in Northern New Mexico, the Torreon’s initial use as a defensive structure may be identified...
The 1973 Seminar on The Lacustrine Kingdoms in the Titicaca Basin (2018)
Co-organized by John V. Murra and Luis G. Lumbreras, this seminar was planned as an international and interdisciplinary study on the Lacustrine Kingdoms around the Titicaca basin (Lupaqa and Paqajes), and their interaction towards the western lowlands. Murra and Lumbreras were able to gather a group of leading Andeanists and students from Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Canada, and the U.S. who worked in the field for almost three months in Southern Peru, Northern Chile, and Bolivia. The Seminar,...
An Accounting of the Dead: Historical Epidemiology and Big Data in the Arch Street Project (2018)
As of the beginning of September 2017, the remains of over 250 individuals were recovered from the building site at 218 Arch Street. While the presence of bodies in what was once the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia burial ground should not surprise us, contemporary documents and written histories of the congregation state that all burials had been moved to the Mount Mariah Cemetery in the mid-nineteenth century. The abundance of human remains left on the original site raises questions for...
The Acolman Cross and the Maize God (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monastery of Acolman founded by the Augustinian order is located near Teotihuacan. The most astonishing tequitqui (Amerindian-Christian art of the sixteenth century) monument in Acolman is the atrial cross made in 1550. Although open-air crosses existed in Europe, the Mexican crosses have a different iconography...
Adaptive Water Management in the American West: Utah Case Studies in Technological Innovations and Community Cooperation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Past, Present, and Future of Water Supplies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The western United States has experienced dramatic population growth for the past century and a half and fluctuating water resources even longer. For example, there is increasing evidence that people began diverting water from Utah’s streams and rivers during the Fremont period (ca. AD 1–1300). As early as 2,000 years ago, the Ancestral...
The Afterlife of a Desert Estate: The Qasr Complex at al-Ḥumayma, Southern Jordan at the Turn of the Second Millennium AD (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 1: Landscapes, Food, and Health" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 1992 to 2002, the Humayma Excavation Project investigated a fairly modest palatial structure dubbed Field F103 at the site of al-Ḥumayma in southern Jordan. Early on, the excavators recognized that this structure should be identified as the qasr and mosque complex described in Arabic historical sources as having...
Algonquian Landscapes and Multispecies Archaeology in the Chesapeake (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. Archaeological and ethnohistorical studies have begun to trace the ritualized practices of Native groups as they returned to places with deep histories throughout the Southeast during the colonial era. In the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, Algonquian groups traveled across contested territories to bury ancestors, animals, and...
All in a Day’s Work: The Health and Welfare of Children Living in 19th Century Staffordshire, UK (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Children played a key role in coal mining and the pottery industry in 19th century Staffordshire (UK). The number of children that worked in this region during the study period fluctuated between 13% and 33%, and one fifth of the workforce comprised of 5-14 year olds. Long working hours and hazardous conditions had a detrimental effect on...
All in the Family: Using Archeology and Genealogy to Construct a Historical Narrative (2018)
Excavations during 2017 for Ballintober Castle in Roscommon, Ireland have uncovered the base of a wall structure and curtain wall for the early fourteenth century castle. As excavations continue to deepen, the structure of the castle reveals a complicated occupational history with cobbled floor occupation levels along with what may be a wall structure appearing underneath this area. The castle excavations can show the Anglo-Norman and Irish ownership of the castle with each owner using different...
Alligators, Serpents, Pirates, and a Wedding: Ritualized Political Landscapes of the Oaxacan Pacific Coast, Mexico (2018)
Straddling maritime, lowlands, and highland environments, the neighboring Chontal and Huave ethnic groups occupy one of the most diverse landscapes in southern Mexico. For over five centuries this resource-rich territory served as a junction for Indigenous and European colonial encounters, where interethnic and intercontinental political alliances and conflicts came forcefully into play. In addition to leaving material remains scattered throughout the landscape, this political history was...
Amazonia as a Perpetual Elsewhere: The Possible and the Permissible in "Natural" Landscapes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amazonia is the consummate, perpetual, wild jungle. Despite a century of archaeological research pointing to rich, complex, and culturally diverse ancient societies, and twenty years of mounting geoarchaeological evidence for densely settled Precolumbian towns, many people still imagine Amazonia as a pristine, primordial forest. In this paper, I dig deep into...
Ambivalence and Apostasy at the Sixteenth century Visita Town of Hunacti, Yucatan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations of three Maya elite houses and a visita church at Hunacti reveal the mixed material signatures expected of a community deeply ambivalent to Spanish rule, strongly attracted to and at the same time repulsed by Spaniard house styles, Christian doctrine, and European goods. In a rural location at a distance from Franciscan...
American Spaces, Irish Places: Assessing Three Urban Communities in 19th Century Irish-America (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. American industry drew millions of Irish immigrants during the 19th and early 20th century, profoundly shaping the face of modern America. This research investigates how Irish communities in the U.S. responded to local conditions within different types of urban spaces, influencing the way communities and subsequent identities within Irish-America were formed....
An Analysis of the Industrialization of the Bourbon Industry in Kentucky: 1870s-Prohibition (2018)
Bourbon has been distilled in Kentucky throughout the state’s history and has influenced how cities in Kentucky have grown over time. Throughout the 1870s, a major rise in the number of distilleries in the state grew as wealthy patrons began buying up small, family-run distilleries and expanding them into a large-scale, booming industry that aimed to answer the demand for bourbon throughout the US. In order to fit the demand, bourbon barons began crafting ways to make more gallons per day, allow...
Ancestors and the Power of Ruins in Nejapa and Tavela, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are numerous examples across the Nejapa region of Oaxaca that demonstrate the ways archaeological ruins retain meaning and power through time. This paper highlights ruins in the sites of Majaltepec, Los Picachos, Cerro del Convento, Hacienda San José, and the modern town of Santa Ana Tavela to show how ruined,...
Ancient Oaxaca beyond Zapotecs and Mixtecs (2021)
This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I contend that the major gulf in Oaxaca archaeology is between Zapotec and Mixtec archaeology on the one hand and the archaeology of other regions and other language speakers on the other. The early focus on Zapotec and Mixtec archaeology stems from having codices written in these languages...
Animal Masters, Guardian Animals, and Masters of Animals in Eastern North American (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation I discuss beliefs that focus on "supernatural" animals and associated charter myths, regalia, and ceramic effigies. Three forms of transcendental animals are evident in eastern North America: animal masters, guardian animals, and masters of animals. Animal masters control the availability and...
Ann Stahl’s Archival Imagination (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Archaeological Practice in Africa and Beyond: Celebrating the Contributions of Ann B. Stahl to Global Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In *Making History in Banda*, Ann Stahl stages an encounter with Rolph Trouillot’s *Silencing the Past* to develop an inspiring discussion of sources, interdisciplinary thinking, the supplemental use of archives, and the fraught dynamics of historical production in...
Anti-Colonialism, State Development, and Araucanian Resilience in the South-Central Andes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation centers on indigenous proto-state or polity formation in the early Spanish period in the south-central Andes and the sociocultural conditions that shaped a specific type of archaeological record, an unostentatious material culture for a polity-level of society. The historical focus is on the...
Anticipating Ruptures: Living with Uncertainty and Undertaking Repair (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing on archaeological research on the longue durée of ancestral Lenca society in Honduras, we argue that centuries of resilience provided the tools people needed to understand and respond to periodic interruptions in the normal progress of seasons, lives, and relationships, “failures” of specific forms of social relations most dramatically visible as...
Apophatic Archaeology: The Materiality, Phenomenology, and Textuality of Caves in Early Medieval Britain (2024)
This is an abstract from the "New Work in Medieval Archaeology, Part 2: Crossing Boundaries, Materialities, and Identities" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although most discussions surrounding humans and caves in Britain begin in prehistory and end with the Roman period, archaeologists have uncovered evidence for early medieval activity across the island. Still, early medieval historians face a methodological problem in which—compared to the...
An Archaeological Approach to the Tobacco Industry in Puerto Rico. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Primary Sources and the Design of Research Projects" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the early 20th century, agriculture was one of the most important industries in the economy of Puerto Rico. The production of crops such as sugar cane, coffee, tobacco and minor fruits (mostly plants like plantain, tubers, rice and corn). Traditionally, archaeological research in the Caribbean, especially in Puerto Rico has...
An Archaeologist and a Historian Walk Into A Classroom . . . (2024)
This is an abstract from the "AI-Proof Learning: Food-Centered Experimental Archaeology in the Classroom" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the fall 2022 semester, we co-taught a Special Topics in Anthropology course entitled The Culture and History of Food and Drink. From our respective academic backgrounds as a historian and an archaeologist, we provided students with both an anthropological and a historical perspective to examine how...
Archaeologist-Collector Collaborations in the San Luis Valley: A Case Study (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research project explores the ways in which the professional world of archaeology clashes with collectors, and how understanding both domains is vital to furthering knowledge of the past. By combining methods of collaboration as well as ethnohistory and field methodologies, professionals and other stewards of the past can retro-actively document sites...
Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Sahuaripa Region of Eastern Sonora (2018)
There is little doubt that there exists cultural continuity linking the Río Sonora tradition and the Ópata (a term referring to an amalgamation of several groups, generally including Eudeve, Teguima and Jova-cf. Yetman 2010; Spicer 1962). The socio-political organization of the late prehispanic Rio Sonora archaeological tradition remains controversial though little studied. Carroll Riley (1982, 1987, 1999, 2005; see also Doolittle 1984, 1988, 2008) proposed that they constitute "statelets",...