Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
226-250 (583 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of correspondence, field notes, catalogs and other archival documents has contributed important information to understand the history of some of the first Maya archaeological collections in the United States and Europe. The field and lab work developed by pioneering explorers and researchers, such as Hermann Berendt (1817-1878) and Charles Rau...
Hidden People in the Past: Honoring the Scholarship of Debra Martin (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Debra L. Martin" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Because archaeologists use ancient material culture to reconstruct the lives of people in the past, they tend to find those people with the most abundant and well-preserved property. Only the past few generations of archaeologists have looked beyond large settlements and monumental buildings to investigate common people. But...
High-Altitude Andean Wetlands: Classificatory Systems, Nomenclature, and Functional Implications (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. High-altitude wetlands, known as bofedales, are vital resources for Andean herding communities because of the high-quality, perennial vegetation they provide. These wetlands are often peat-accumulating, and are attracting renewed attention because of their roles in carbon sequestration and water...
Hillfort Horizons: Rethinking Violence and Egalitarianism during the Andean Late Intermediate Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond “Barbarians”: Dimensions of Military Organization at the Bleeding Edge of the Premodern State" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Central Andes, the era immediately prior to the consolidation of the Inca Empire is known as the Late Intermediate period (LIP, ca. AD 1000–1450), traditionally seen as a "stateless" time between episodes of political centralization. Both Inca and Spanish accounts from the early...
Historians in Action: Historical Research and Enhanced Interpretation at Chiricahua National Monument and Fort Bowie National Historic Site (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Partners at Work: Promoting Archaeology and Collaboration in the Chiricahua Mountains" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled in the heart of the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, Chiricahua National Monument (CHIR) and Fort Bowie National Historic Site (FOBO) protect, preserve, and interpret the complex histories of human interaction with the landscape and the resulting conflict that erupted between...
Historic Preservation and the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps (2018)
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and other federally sponsored work programs, provided much needed employment during the Great Depression and have been examined extensively by scholars in a range of fields. However, few are aware that a parallel program, Indian Emergency Conservation Work, later subsumed into the CCC as the Indian Division (CCC-ID), offered similar programs for Native American young men and performed extensive conservation work on reservations. These men built roads,...
Historic Tewa pottery 1600-1800 and Social Survivance (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pottery making over the long arch of Tewa history is episodic; social changes bringing small and large-scale modification and sometimes transformation to pottery forms and iconography. Pottery, or more precisely, its aesthetics and production are ritualistic, serving as a critical and material conceptual ideal of the Tewa world. And, significantly, pottery...
Historical Archaeology as a Device for Heritage Protection in West Patagonia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Current Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Archaeology of the Southern Cone" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The relatively recent colonization of West Patagonia is perceived as a main component of cultural heritage by the communities of the Aisén region (Chile). Understanding colonial life makes sense in the construction of the narrative of local and regional identities. Hence, historical archaeology can play...
A Historical Perspective on Population Patterns and Settlement Layout at Chajul, Guatemala, AD 1530–1821 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archival records suggest that Chajul was the largest town in the Ixil region during the colonial period. Spanish chronicles emphasize that different polities and communities were merged into a single colonial settlement during the foundation of the town as a congregación during the sixteenth century. This information is also remembered in...
A History of Knowledge of the Amazonian Dark Earths (2018)
The anthropogenic origin of the Amazonian dark earths (Terra Pretas) has been a methodologically assured fact for 70 years. Especially during the last 30 years, Terra Preta have been scientifically investigated with increasing intensity and in an ever-widening context. Currently, the dominant concept guiding research is the idea of binding atmospheric carbon which artificially produced dark earths. The large-scale production of terra preta is said to be an efficient instrument to combat global...
"A History of the Ancient Southwest" Revisited (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "A History of the Ancient Southwest" was published 15 years ago. How would I re-write it today? After a brief review of that aging narrative, I’ll revisit several key points, threads, and themes in light of new information and understandings. I will explore the importance of continental-scale contexts, hinted but not fully developed in the book. And I...
A History of the Yumbos, Barbacoan Peoples of Northwestern Ecuador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many years of archaeological research under my direction coupled with ethnohistoric, linguistic and genetic studies by other scholars have allowed for the compilation of a fairly detailed history of the Yumbos, a cloud forest people of the western flank of the Andes in Pichincha province, Ecuador and members of the Barbacoan language family. I will review...
Home Is Where the Rajawala’ Are: Making Habitable Space among the Kaqchikel and Other Maya (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mayan communities are located within sacred space. Each town has four principal guardians roughly aligned with cardinal directions and, in precontact times, a central altar. Each of the guardians is associated with a landmark (an escarpment, a cave/overhang, a spring or stream, a mountain) and embodies the energy of...
Home: Place, Space, Survival, Resistance (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-nineteenth century, Spicy Baxter and siblings were emancipated by their father, George White, a freedman in Madison County, Kentucky. The family moved south, away from their northern Madison County farm to a rugged, isolated, parcel in the south of the county. Here, Spicy and her female siblings lived until the early...
Horse Warriors and Warrior Horses: Considering Horse Subjectivity in Plains Indigenous Societies (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Survey in the Rio Grande Gorge of New Mexico over the past decade has revealed a robust corpus of Plains Biographic rock art depicting the coups and accomplishments of human warriors. While horses are equally present, most of them are secondary to the narratives depicted and appear as ridden mounts or captured wealth. However, an unusual panel found in the...
Horses in East-Central Montana Rock Art: A Test for Crow, Blackfoot, or Other Ethnic Affiliation (2021)
This is an abstract from the "From the Plains to the Plateau: Papers in Honor of James D. Keyser" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Keyser’s interest in horse styles in rock art of the Northwestern Plains has expanded our knowledge and ways of thinking about this image. His recent work to quantify differences in Crow and Blackfoot horses has led to identifying infusions of each group into the other’s territory. However, his identification system has...
Household and Community Scales of Post-Famine Demographic Change in Western Ireland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Making Historical Archaeology Matter: Rethinking an Engaged Archaeology of Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Rural Communities of Western Ireland and Southern Italy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The national demographic ramifications of the Irish potato famine in the late nineteenth century are well documented; however, there is an absence of full understanding of the continuum of its social and psychological...
How Dugouts (and Digging) Transformed the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1720 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What’s Canoe? Recent Research on Dugouts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long before colonization, coastal inhabitants in Carolina’s Lowcountry used dugout canoes for trading, fishing, and gathering oysters. When the English intruded into this watery environment in 1670, many settlers migrated from Barbados, bringing captive Africans and hopes for establishing a profitable system of slave-based, staple-crop...
How to Dig a Drinking Well: Watery Politics on China’s Han Frontier (2018)
Water plays an undeniable role in the constitution of politics and society, presenting an elemental force to be controlled for the expansion of agrarian economies. The political life line linked with water is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than with the Han Empire whose massive canalization and irrigation works were necessary to facilitate state expansion into deserts and tropics. The archaeological focus on water and agrarian infrastructure has however overlooked other capacities of water,...
Human Plunder: The Role of Maya Slavery in Postclassic and Early Conquest Era Yucatán, 1450-1550 (2018)
Upon initial contact with the lowland Yucatec Maya, the Europeans discovered that a significant number of Maya slaves existed within the Maya communities that they encountered. War captives, orphans, and forced and enslaved sexual servants from the lower classes, Maya slaves and their possession became by the late Postclassic and early colonial period the major source of wealth and power of the traditional Maya Nobility. Divorced from control over specified traditional patrimonial landholdings...
Hydro-Social Transformations and Economic Realities at Aventura, Belize (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. This paper presents legacies of water supplies at the Maya site of Aventura, in northern Belize. During its ancient occupation, Aventura was a city with ample water resources integrated into its settlement. Access to this water was not restricted by economic status as local political ecology was organized heterarchically. In 1848, refugees...
"I Can Tell It Always": Confronting Colonialist Presumptions and Disciplinary Blind Spots through Community-Based Research (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nineteenth and early twentieth century history of western Oregon is rife with Euro-American presumptions about the trajectory, pace, and nature of Native cultural change. Federal architects of the state’s reservation system and, later, reservation agents wrote extensively about Native peoples’ ability...
I Didn’t Get Here Because of My Trauma: I’m Here Because I’m Good at Archaeology (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The monoraciality of archaeology perpetuates systems where many European American archaeologists assume archaeologists who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have arrived because of affirmative action. Our presence is considered the result of traumatic lives that led to...
Identifying Lakam-Tun: A Sixteenth-Century Maya Fortified Site in Lake Miramar, Chiapas, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on the Postclassic period at Lake Miramar in the southern Lacandon Jungle of Chiapas permits identifying the fortified island of Lakam-Tun. The site was destroyed in 1586 by Juan de Morales Villavicencio in his attempt to conquer the Cholti'-Lacandon, who then sheltered deeper in the jungle until 1695. Earlier research failed to locate important...
Images of the Living Past: 19th-Century Moche Archaeological Photographs and Everyday Indigeneity in the Northern Peruvian Andes (2018)
This presentation analyzes late 19th-century photography of Moche pre-Columbian buildings, as a way to inspect the buildings’ incorporation into everyday indigenous lives. I will focus on the work by German scientist Hans Heinrich Brüning (1848-1928). First arrived as an engineer hired by the most important sugar haciendas of the region, Brüning’s interests quickly shifted towards archaeological and ethnographic studies during his stay in the Northern Peruvian Andes between 1875 and 1920. His...