Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
51-75 (583 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii in nineteenth-century Yucatán and shows how the rise of the hacienda system played a contingent role in reshaping beekeeping practices and human-bee relationships. Using primary sources such as beekeeping manuals and...
Before the Aurora of Hegemony: How the La Corona Community Brooked the Kaanul Dynasty (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By examining archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the northwestern Peten during the Classic period, we can gain valuable insights into the strategies used by the Kaanul dynasts to establish and maintain a unique regional hegemony in the Maya Lowlands. We focus on the site of La Corona where we have...
Before the Dig: The "Archaeologizing" of Peruvian Heritage Sites Prior to Formal Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contemporary southeastern Peruvian towns of Chinchero and Urquillos sit atop Inka population centers and are connected by the Urquillos Valley. Now occupied by family farms and walking routes, this steep valley also hosts former Inka roads and several understudied archaeological sites that survive in various stages of integration with small...
The Beginnings of Archaeological Administration and Labor at El Tajín, Veracruz, 1900-1938 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the history and ethnography of archaeology, only recently has archaeological labor – both administrative and physical – become an area of interest. In the Mexican context, recent historical research has dated the emergence of institutional archaeology to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). However, there are few site-scale studies that explore...
Behind the Man of "Pro and Profit:" Weaving a Colonial City from the Obraje de San Marcos de Chincheros (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the early Colonial period in Peru Antonio de Oré, a native of the Canary Islands, moved to Peru in hopes of finding fame and fortune. In the 1570s Oré established the obraje (textile mill) de San Marcos de Chincheros (AD C. 1570-C.1823) outside of Huamanga (Ayacucho). At the obraje the mainly indigenous workforce was forced to produce large quantities...
Being 'Post-Indian' in 19th Century New England (2018)
In the decades following the American Revolution, Native people throughout Southern New England took part in the development of a Native basket industry specifically targeted for settler consumption. Scholars have long acknowledged that basket styles communicated tribal and even familial affiliation among basketmakers and Native community members. But for customers, the objects represented a connection with a Native artisan who filled the role of the "Vanishing Indian," an emerging trope in...
Belongings as Archives: An Abundant Approach to Sugpiaq Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The historian Tiya Miles argues for an abundant approach to history, in which researchers learn to excavate absences in the historical record instead of allowing those silences to stand. Belongings (a.k.a. artifacts or objects) are additional archives that contain the stories, energies, and contexts in which they were made and used. As part of my work with...
The Berkeley Schools of Geography and Andean Studies (2018)
This paper explores the legacy of the "Berkeley School of Andean Studies" and its relations to the eponymous "Berkeley School of Geography." We examine the relationships between the key founding figures of both schools including John H. Rowe and Carl O. Sauer, but also their students, disciples, and other scholars influenced by their seminal research. Through a review of the interactions between members of the two schools, as well as academic genealogies and writings, our paper has three main...
Between Enlightenment and Structuralism: Bororo and Kadiwéu Collections outside Brazil, 1791–1938 (2018)
From the Philosophical Voyage to Brazil of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira in 1791 to the Brazilian fieldwork of the young philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss from 1936 to 1938, nearly 4000 Bororo artifacts and more than 300 Kadiwéu pots were collected for museums in Europe and the United States by naturalists, anthropologists, missionaries, artists, and adventurers. What began as part of the project of the Enlightenment to catalog the world based on the principles of Linnean taxonomy turned into a...
Betwixt and Between: Negotiating Hispanic Identity from Past to Present (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on Hispanic-descent communities in the American West appears to be betwixt and between discussions of indigeneity and nation-building, and for good reason. Drawing on historical and archaeological research of Spanish colonial land grants from the northern and middle Rio Grande, this paper examines some of the ways "Spanish" settlers navigated the tumultuous...
Beyond First Encounters: Mechanisms of Social Transformation at the Colonial Port of Veracruz (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. The Port of Veracruz was significant not only as the landing site of Hernán Cortés, but also as a central gateway for European colonists and African slaves entering New Spain. First encounters between immigrants and natives had significant long-term consequences, but initial interactions were only a starting...
Beyond the Holes of Archaeology: Paying Attention to Indigenous Academics, Artists, and Activists (2018)
Archaeology continues to need the infusion of indigenous perspectives, not only to take responsibility for the discipline’s past in colonial contexts, but also to advance its ability to understand human histories – especially indigenous ones – in respectful, innovative, and inclusive ways. This need is particularly strong for those archaeologists who study Native American cultural and community life just before, right into, and well after the onset of European colonialism and for those who are...
Big Data Investigation of Persistence in Ethnically Homogenous and Heterogeneous Communities on the Late Nineteenth-Century Central Great Plains (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Big Ideas to Match Our Future: Big Data and Macroarchaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological record captures the material fallout of social processes operating at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Here I explore generational and supra-generational social processes of colonizers inhabiting a foreign and dynamic landscape under complex social conditions. Patent and census records allow for a big...
A Biography of the Yumbos (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Yumbos, Barbacoan peoples of the western flank of the Andes in northern Ecuador’s Pichincha province, have been the principal object of my studies for the past four decades. I draw upon archaeological research by myself and my team (especially including Alejandra...
The Biology and Mythology of Ancestor Lithification in the Andes (2018)
Throughout human history, many cultures have told stories about people who turned to stone in death. What is the inspiration for these myths? How do they relate to taphonomic processes that affect deceased organisms? This paper addresses these questions in an Andean context by comparing pre-Hispanic narratives of lithification to post-mortem biological processes. In the Andes, tales of lithification focus on ancestors and local heroes, who, in their petrified state, continue to interact with the...
A Bird’s-Eye View: Historic Aircraft Navigation Arrows in Northern Arizona (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Historical Archaeologies of the American Southwest, 1800 to Today" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the invention of the airplane in 1903, the early 20th century saw the rapid development of aviation technology, both for commercial and recreational purposes. As early pilots struggled to effectively navigate during an era characterized by unruly aircraft and sparse ground support, concrete arrows, beacons, and...
The Birnirk/Thule Migrations: Pushed from an Overpopulated Bering Strait Dominated by Old Bering Sea Culture (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Arctic Pasts: Dimensions of Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A climate-driven eastward push of Thule migrants remains axiomatic to many arctic archaeologists, associated with presumed warming weather of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), by tradition dated ca. AD 1000. Thule researchers implicated a rapid migration by rapacious “over-killing” seal-hunters and whalers entering unoccupied landscapes—increasingly...
Blue Tunics and Royal Lions: Colonial Period Changes in Clothing and Changing Conceptions of Indigeneity in the Spanish Colonial Americas (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. This paper addresses the impact of conquest and colonialism on indigenous Andean peoples’ clothing styles and textile motifs in the central Andes, using examples from elsewhere in Latin America and beyond to contextualize documented patterns. Comparing Prehispanic and colonial period examples, I use several classes of material culture...
Body Histories, Historical Bodies: Adornment, Culture and Identity through Time (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Culturing the Body: Prehistoric Perspectives on Identity and Sociality" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The body is so many things simultaneously. It is an historical object, a site of experience and violence, a set of behaviors, and is both material and metaphysical. We cannot conceive of history without bodies. Bodily adornments add further nuances that are personal, symbolic, political, situational, and...
Born This Way, Becoming That Way: Difference, Disability and Sickness in Inka Society (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Medicine and Healing in the Americas: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Perspectives" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Inkas’ social constructions of physical difference recognized ‘disability’ as a permanent state of being, one that Guaman Poma de Ayala suggested was considered a specific calle or passage of life. Unlike much of the contemporary Late Middle Ages of Christian Europe, such individuals were not...
Bound to the Western Waters: Searching for Lewis and Clark at Ft. Kaskaskia, Illinois (2018)
Lewis and Clark recruited 11 soldiers from the small US Army outpost of Ft. Kaskaskia (1802-1807), Illinois, in 1803 to join their expedition to explore the American west. This event traditionally has been identified as having occurred at a 1750s French fort of the same name. The 2017 SIU summer field school investigations within the fort walls including the use of LIDAR, GPR, and hand excavations revealed that the fort is primarily a single component French construction dating to the mid-1700s...
Bridging the Divide: A Study of Fourteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Native Settlements in the Middle Chesapeake (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists (including the author) investigating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Native sites in the Chesapeake point out how materially different these assemblages are from those recovered from contemporary colonial sites. Characterized by materials almost wholly produced by Native hands with some...
Bright Light in the Big City: The Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the Drama of Darkness (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Populated by as many as 200,000 people, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan—like most cities—was buzzing with activity through the night. Given the dynamism of the city, and especially weighed against our modern understanding of the sounds and lights that keep cities alive during the night, it is significant that one...
Bringing Together Accounts of the Pueblo of Pojoaque (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Collaboration to Partnership in Pojoaque, New Mexico" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Until recently, widely accessible published works concerning the Pueblo of Pojoaque, its people, culture, and history, have come by way of mostly non-Native academics and other researchers. While highly valuable for understanding this Tewa community’s past, they often carry the inherent biases of their authors or leave out the...
Bronze Age Transitions in Their Own Words: Central Asian Interfaces (2023)
This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as archaeology and...