Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
201-225 (583 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Meaning and function of rock art elements, especially when related to site location, have been discussed for years. Rock art can represent statements about group identity or social relationships and even demark boundaries or territories. Rock art is a visual legacy created to communicate and reaffirm...
"For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People": A Critical examination of American park-space (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People". Teddy Roosevelt’s words speak to the legacy of park-land narratives as unrestricted spaces open to all. Beneath this public veneer are contested landscapes founded in social division and inequality. With the origins of the National Parks, we look at how such spaces...
Foreigners Building a Future in Colonial San Juan, 1910. (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. Throughout the centuries, San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico and a port city, has received an influx of foreigners who have left their footprint within the urban layout. This presentation will address another way of studying the presence of immigrants, within the six neighborhoods of the walled city of San Juan in 1910. Census data...
Forgotten or Remembered? Rural-Urban Connections in the Modern and in the Past. (2018)
In the aftermath of the United States election in 2016, it was claimed that one reason for the outcome was that voters in rural areas were tired of being "forgotten" by the rest of the country. However, this statement is problematic in putting forth a rural-urban dichotomy that may not exist in modern times in the western world, and may have rarely existed in the past in the ways that some assert in popular media. While studying different forms of rural archaeology and landscapes, I have seen...
From "Nation" to "Indio" and "Español": Transitions in Indigenous Culture in the Missions of San Antonio (2018)
The Spanish colonial advance into Texas during the late 17th century resulted in the establishment of several missions to house members of dozens of indigenous groups and a handful of presidios to protect the missions from raiding bands of Comanches and Apaches. The Padres that were in charge of the missions enforced systematic policies and procedures to affect change in the identity of the resident indigenous nations. The policies and procedures specifically targeted religious believes,...
From Accommodation to Massacre: Evolving Native Responses to Spanish Military Expeditions in the Interior Southeast, 1540-1568 (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 1540 and 1568, three Spanish military expeditions penetrated the interior region of the southeastern United States, interacting on two or more occasions with several Native chiefdoms extending between Alabama and the Carolinas. The army of Hernando de Soto crossed this entire area in 1540, followed by revisits to the western...
From Contact to Colony at the Edge of the Tiguex Province (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Hill People: New Research on Tijeras Canyon and the East Mountains" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first accounts of the Rio Grande Valley were made by outsiders on the Vázquez de Coronado expedition in 1540. Their descriptions regularly focused on the river valley and its associated settlements even though other surrounding areas were well settled at that time. By exploring texts written during the earliest...
From Food of the Gods to Avocado Toast: Bringing the Mesoamerican Avocado to California in the Nineteenth Century (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest avocados of the Americas were so prized by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec peoples for their rich caloric content and buttery flavor that they were portrayed in iconography on king’s tombs and used as place names for ancient cities. During the colonial period, the Spanish used the fruit as food for enslaved people on sugar plantations across their...
From Municipal Dumpsite to Private Liberal Arts University: Insights into the City of San Antonio from a Nineteenth-Century Midden (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The modern-day campus of Trinity University is located on a nineteenth and early twentieth century municipal dump site on what was then the margins of the city of San Antonio, Texas . The land also served as a limestone rock quarry for the Alamo Cement Company (1884-1931), a community baseball diamond, and a lover’s lane. The university bought the land and...
From Narrative Picture Writing Bands to Pseudo Cartographies. How Native Scribes Invented Powerful New Media after the Conquest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have always believed that maps and cartographiies did exist in preconquest Mesoamerica. The large amount of early colonial Native maps seems to be evidence for such geographic media. But as yet, no pre-Hispanic lienzos and maps have become known. However, the earliest lienzos do show pre-Hispanic...
From there, a great long time ago, even before the Incas were born: Representations of the Inka Empire among the Lurin Yauyos (2018)
Andean archaeology consistently uses the Spanish colonial written record as a guide in interpreting the characteristics of the different societies that fell under the Inka rule. However, a growing body of scholarship on the material culture of such incorporated societies shows that the nature of their relationship with the Empire was variable, and that Inka control was not territorially continuous. One key strategy through which the Inka incorporated these groups was the entangling and capture...
Game Theory, Chaos Theory, and the Archaeology of Indigenous Responses to Global Spanish Colonialisms (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dominant historical narratives have favored interpretations that conquered groups yielded to the political and economic might of colonizing powers. Recent models in archaeology, however, emphasize that indigenous responses to colonialism are more complex than succumbing or capitulating to colonial and imperial hegemony, and that indigenous peoples...
Gardens in the Aleutian Islands: Landscape Management by Unangan/Unangas Ancestors (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric large village midden sites in the Aleutian Islands provide soil chemistry and drainage environments optimal for the growth of plants that feature prominently in Unangan/Unangas traditional subsistence. Previous interpretations view this as fortuitous and non-deliberate. We argue that evidence suggests instead that plants useful in subsistence and...
Geographies of Black Cimarronaje in the Northern Andes of Ecuador (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Construction of the colonial landscape and its legacies that guide the agendas of neoliberal governments have permitted a series of effects that define that north-central Andes under a historical geography created by the hacienda system and its confluence of human exploitation,...
Gift of the Gods: A Mashup of the History of Mesoamerican Avocados (2023)
This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The earliest avocados of the Americas were dispersed by extinct megafauna, and later by human populations, including Olmec, Maya, and Aztecs peoples. Prized for their flavor and rich caloric content, avocados were portrayed on Maya king’s tombs, served as the municipal symbol of ancient Mesoamerican cities, as a month in the Maya...
Glass: Breathing into Matter (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Iron Age of Northwest Portugal: Leftovers of Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Blowing into molten glass gave it form, a breathtaking invention of the first century BCE. Before that, glass vessels were made by using the core-forming technique and by casting, which were more expensive and less efficient methods. Glass blowing enabled the play of forms and color while making glass vessels more accessible to a...
A Greasy Mess: Reconsidering Prehistoric Bone Grease Extraction and its Implications for Site Interpretation (2018)
Ethnohistoric accounts and archaeological evidence show that North American Indigenous hunter gatherers utilized fats and oils rendered from smashing and boiling faunal bone for dietary and other uses. In the archaeological record, evidence of bone grease extraction is interpreted from fractured faunal remains recovered from midden deposits and thermal features. However, most archaeological studies of bone grease extraction tend to focus on subsistence to the exclusion of other uses. This...
The Great House and the Old Plate: Planter Household Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological interpretations of household organization have long recognized its role in the construction of social identities and in the furtherance of social goals. While much of the historical archaeology of Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean more broadly, has focused on exploring spatial and consumption choices of enslaved Africans and African...
Healing Places and Objects in Irish Archaeology (2018)
The concept of healing—in any time period—has received relatively little attention in Irish archaeology. While bioarchaeologists have examined ailments and injuries in prehistoric and historic Irish populations, discussion and understandings of how, why, and where people sought treatment, and which treatments were deemed successful, remain elusive. This paper will draw on Gesler’s (1992) concept of therapeutic landscapes, most commonly utilized in health geography, in order to examine healing...
Health and Healthcare Management in a California Black Town (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After the dissolution of the Reconstruction Era, black Americans were faced with the legislative and social constraints of the Jim Crow Era. These limitations on life spurred a call to action to create black settlements free of white supremacy and anti-black sentiments, such as the settlement of Allensworth. The town of Allensworth, located in Tulare County of...
Health and Mortality During the Transition to Commercial Dairy Farming in Nineteenth Century Upstate New York (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the relationship between farm production and strategy and the health and mortality patterns of farm families during the late nineteenth century in upstate New York. This was a time when farmers were transitioning from subsistence to commercial farming and when dairy farming was becoming the preferred strategy to increase profits. Here, we focus...
Healthcare and Citizenship in the Context of World War II Japanese American Internment (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Health, Wellness, and Ability" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During World War II, approximately 120,000 individuals of Japanese heritage were incarcerated by the United States government. One-third of those unjustly incarcerated were legal American citizens. This talk examines the types of medicine and healthcare made available to imprisoned Japanese Americans based on their citizenship status....
Hearth, Home, and Colonialism: Cultural Entanglement at Calluna Hill, a 1630s Pequot War Household (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the nature of cultural change and continuity during the early colonial period (ca. 1615–1637), an understudied period in southern New England. The earliest years of intercultural exchange between Europeans and Native people in the region is believed to have brought sweeping disturbances to Native American lifeways; however,...
Heritage Enhances Resilience?: The Solomon Butcher History Project of Custer County, Nebraska (2018)
Solomon Butcher was a citizen photographer smitten with what he referred to as the "history project," to photodocument the citizens of Custer County, Nebraska as the frontier receded further west. From 1886-1892, he imaged perhaps one third of the occupants, staging them in front of occupied or recently abandoned sod houses and making them party to his commemoration of a constructed pioneer heritage. When severe droughts hit in the mid-1890s, did this shared pioneer "can-do" heritage sustain...
Heritage, Healing, and Coming Home: An Archaeologist Encounters Her Ancestors (2018)
Archaeologists in the Americas rarely study their own history; rather, the bulk of archaeology in this region is done on Indigenous histories. Non-indigenous archaeologists studying Indigenous history can contribute to the erasure of Indigenous peoples from the accounting of their own past by centering the scientific study of material culture as the best or only way of knowing the truth. So what happens when an Indigenous archaeologist encounters her own ancestors in the archaeological record?...