Ethnohistory/History (Other Keyword)
376-400 (583 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple dramatic changes in human-forest relationships are manifest in the landscape of the coastal region that spans southern North Carolina to northern Florida known as the Lowcountry. Ecologically diverse bottomland hardwood forests managed by Native Americans since at least the Woodland period were destroyed by settler-colonist...
People-as-Animal Comparisons and the Indigenous Experience of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal metaphors can express conceptualizations of humanity and attitudes about society when referring to groups of people. In Spanish colonial contexts in the Americas, these metaphors often reinforced social hierarchies and denigrated indigenous peoples. Although few, there are first-hand accounts of indigenous authors subverting these discourses to...
Peopling the Post-contact Landscape in Central California: A Pragmatic Approach (2018)
A cornerstone of recent pragmatic approaches to archaeology is the notion that our efforts can be judged by their practical outcomes. This may take the form of illuminating historical silences, and for those archaeologists working in post-contact or colonial contexts this often means working with indigenous groups seeking governmental or popular recognition. In this paper, we explore our collaborative efforts to discover and characterize archaeological sites dating to the early historic era in...
Perception and Interpretation of the Landscape in the Lienzo of Coixtlahuaca/Seler II (2018)
The Lienzo of Coixtlahuaca II, also named Seler II, was brought by the German mesoamericanist Eduard Seler to Berlin, Germany in 1897. The 375 x 425 cm document, made in the first half of the XVI century in the city of Coixtlahuaca located in the modern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, is made of eight cotton cloths sewn together to form an enormous Lienzo. The history of Coixtlahuaca's cacicazgo, its territory and lineages, is depicted alongside their mythical origins and migrations. The document...
Periodizing Andean Colonialism: A Comparison of Archaeological and Historical Data From Markaqocha, Cusco, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Lost in Transition: Social and Political Changes in the Central Southern Andes from the Late Prehispanic to the Early Colonial Periods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper assesses the problem of materially distinguishing between the Andean Late Horizon Inka Empire (ca. 1450-1532 CE) and ensuing Spanish Colonial Period (1532-1824 CE) in contexts that lack overtly colonial artefacts. The arrival of Spanish...
Persistence in Turkey Husbandry Practices in the Southwest and Four Corners Region: The isotopic and ethnohistorical evidence (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. aDNA analysis reveals an independent domestication event of Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) occurred in the Southwestern United States between 200 BC—AD 500. While this event was distinct from the domestication of turkey within the Mesoamerican world approximately 2000 years...
The Persistence of Resistance: Resiliency and Survival in the Pueblo World, 1539-1696 (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. From the first instance of contact with outsiders, native peoples of the American Southwest have been confronted with, and have confronted, challenges to survival and cultural continuity. The earliest organized exploration of the Southwest by Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539 resulted in an initial act of resistance by Zuni pueblo: the...
Persistent Places, Enduring Objects: Ritualized Spaces and Things in the Powhatan Political World (2018)
Seventeenth-century colonial chroniclers repeatedly mention a series of places and objects that surrounded political negotiations and efforts at alliance-building by Powhatan societies. While regional scholarship has focused on competition over subsistence resources, regional trade dynamics, and the regulated exchange of "prestige goods" as central to the development of these political structures, we shift the focus toward the engagement between these societies and specific places and objects...
Perspectives from a Privy Past: Neighborhood and Race in Late Nineteenth-century Creole New Orleans (2018)
The Faubourg Tremé is often referred to as America’s oldest African-American neighborhood and has been the site of significant social, cultural, and political developments in New Orleans for the past two hundred years. From the colonial period onward, the neighborhood fostered the growth of the city’s Creole population and displayed a distinct cultural and demographic makeup unmatched in other parts of the American South. In recent decades, scholars have considered the Tremé as a rich site of...
The Phantom Lake: Spectral Archaeology in the Tulare Basin (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the 1990s, spectral thematics have grown increasingly present in the humanities, stressing the persistence of memory, traces, and absences in the cultural sphere. Anthropologists likewise have contributed to this moment, as with Justin Armstrong’s spectral ethnography and Theo Kindynis’s' graffiti archaeology. This emerging methodology is promising...
The Pickett’s Mill Farmstead: An Archaeology of the Inarticulate Whites (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often use both archaeological data and historical records to assist in their reconstruction of the past. However, historical records are usually written by a small portion of the population and this written history is usually about themselves and not a representation of the whole. The inarticulate Whites are a group of European descent people...
The Pipil/Nicarao Migration from the Perspective of Pacific Nicaragua: An Archaeological Critique of Mythstorical Mobility (2018)
Ethnoshitorical sources describe migrations from central Mexico of Nahuat and Mangue speakers, known as the Pipil/Nicarao and the Chorotega, who settled along the Pacific Coast of Central America in the centuries prior to European contact. According to these accounts the new groups introduced cultural and religious traits into settlements in El Salvador, the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, and northwestern Costa Rica. Beginning in 2000, archaeologists from the University of Calgary have investigated...
Place of the Songs: Hopi Connections to the Mesa Verde Region (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. Hopi connections to the Mesa Verde region have been noted by anthropologists and archaeologists for more than a century. Mesa Verde is not explicitly mentioned by name in some of the older, commonly cited collections of Hopi clan migration traditions, but contemporary Hopi people are...
Placemaking through Objects: The Global World in 19th Century Towns in the Philippines (2018)
This paper will explore the idea of placemaking in Philippine towns established in the latter part of 19th century AD under the Spanish colonial period. The Spanish regime through the Laws of the Indies significantly altered the indigenous concepts of territory and space. I propose that the Europeanised local elites straddled between the European and indigenous ideas of boundaries and space. Following the colonial religious and administrative boundaries and the customary notions of interactions,...
Places that Percolate: French Post Park and the Creation of a Hoosier Origin Story (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the surface, French Post Park, a small, wooded picnic area and campground located on the south bank of the Wabash River in Carroll County, Indiana, may seem unremarkable. Covering about 5.4 acres, the park’s amenities consist of a small shelter, a few fire rings, a boat ramp, and a swing set. But, to the people of...
Political Authority and the Creation of Wilderness: American National Parks and Mexican Eco-Archaeological Parks (2018)
Over the last several decades, scholars have reexamined the importance of spatiality to human life and argued that space is social, relational, and that it produces and is produced by social relationships. This reconceptualization of space has highlighted the ways in which the production of landscapes is integral to the creation, maintenance, and negation of social inequality and political authority. Recent archaeological approaches to studying inequality through landscape have taken a variety...
Political Dynamics through the Discourse of the Baah Sajal of Yaxchilan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the eighth century, the stone monuments of Yaxchilán and its area of influence recurrently recorded individuals with the title sajal, a position associated with leaders of corporate groups with functions related to the government of peripheral sites, administration, war, and circulation of goods. Among all the sajals of...
Polychromy in Nahua Art (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through the analysis of several examples of Nahua artistic expression, including the mural paintings of Tlaxcala, the Borgia Group codices, and a wood sculpture encrusted with mosaic, this paper aims to demonstrate that the societies of Late Postclassic central Mexico cultivated a strong interest in polychromy,...
Ponderosa Pine Culturally Modified Trees (CMTs) at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, Colorado: What We Have Learned from 40 Years of Recording, Dating, Analyzing, and Consulting with Tribal Peoples (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ponderosa pine trees with cultural modifications, primarily bark peeling and wood removal, were first officially documented in Colorado at Great Sand Dunes in the late 1970s by the author for her master’s thesis. At that time, CMTs were not recorded as cultural resources in Colorado. Since then, several hundred ponderosa pine CMTs...
Post-contact Times in Southern Patagonia (2018)
The history of the different indigenous hunter-gatherer groups that inhabited Patagonia since the Pleistocene was profoundly affected by the arrival of Europeans during the sixteenth century. This resulted in significant changes in various aspects of their lifeways, both archaeologically and ethnographically recorded. We integrate the available archaeological data of the post-contact period in southern Patagonia, along with ethnographic and historical data; showing the heterogeneous and complex...
Postcards in the Landscape: Considering Lower Pecos Pictographs as Nahua Pilgrimage Destinations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chicomoztoc, the place of seven caves, from which the Nahua ancestors emerged, appears in many central Mexican pictorial manuscripts as a place of origin and one of pilgrimage. Like the mythical Aztlan, its location has not been confirmed; perhaps several such places served different groups of people. However, recent...
Postclassic Communities and Colonial Reconfigurations in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin, Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous investigations in the region known as the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, have proposed the existence of a "Postclassic Paradox" in which Late Postclassic prehispanic communities identified in 16th century historic documents cannot be identified archaeologically. In this poster, I expand on this idea and propose that...
Power as Nurture: The Inkas and Their Tiwanaku Ancestors (2018)
Religion bonded Andean societies across centuries (Moseley 1992; Kolata 1995) and archaeologists request greater focus on religious ideologies to evaluate the Andean past (Kolata 2000; Hastorf 2007)—gaping silence in the scholarship surrounds the so-called "female, spiritual" side of society. From this hurin moiety (Rostworowski 2007; Silverblatt 1987), particulars of an overarching hegemonic strategy of power-as-nurture emerged among the Inkas (and with different details among their Tiwanaku...
The Power of Blade Stones in Postclassic Mesoamerica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the present discussion, I will focus on mutually constitutive relationships between people and the material world, specifically on gestational dynamics, suggesting that by stone flaking and stone chipping, children (of stone) were fabricated. From the womb of the earth, which is very much a stony...
Pragmatist Philosophy of Social Science: A Proposal (2018)
This paper explores the potential of a pragmatist-inspired philosophy of social science for both archaeology and social anthropology. Firstly, we explain the main tenets of contemporary pragmatism and the variations within it. Secondly, we analyse the potential methodological ramifications for both archaeology and social anthropology. Thirdly, we discuss some of the critique of this pragmatist stance.