Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology (Other Keyword)
426-435 (435 Records)
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of local whisky production has been unregulated and illegal. Both production and distribution of illicit liquor moved underground with the passing of the 18th Amendment – known as the Prohibition – in 1919. This economic shift occurred in tight-knit mountain communities where knowledge has been vigilantly guarded. This continuous whisky production cycle has resulted in the deep social, economic, and cultural ties that persist in the Cataloochee...
Which Serpent Are We Talking About? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many parts of the world including the Americas, snakes are incorporated into symbolic and metaphorical constructs in order to better describe and understand natural and social components of various cosmologies. As a result, their depictions are often enhanced with attributes that depart from...
White Eye Traditional Knowledge Camp: Exploring Prehistoric Subsistence Behavior through Gwich’in Traditional Ways of Knowing (2018)
This study explores how indigenous archaeological methods can quantitatively assess prehistoric subsistence practices in interior Alaska. Archaeological sites in Alaska are among the oldest in the Americas, providing valuable information concerning human/animal interactions. Although there are substantial amounts of archaeological information present in the literature, there is a distinct lack of indigenous ecological knowledge. The goal of this project is to combine traditional indigenous ways...
Why so Low so Long? Constraints on Human Population Growth in Late Pleistocene Sahul (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Fifty Years of Fretwell and Lucas: Archaeological Applications of Ideal Distribution Models" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human populations in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) probably numbered in the tens of thousands, two orders of magnitude below the 3-4 million estimated at time of European contact. They were also more patchily distributed than simple hypotheses grounded in an ideal free distribution...
Women's Portages: Colonial Encounters, Gender, and Indigenous Worldview in the Great Lakes (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dakota and then Anishinaabeg women were central figures in water-based travel cycles in an annual round directed by plant, animal, and river relations within the Woodland Tradition. Portages, including Women's Portages, are material records of Indigenous women's labor before, during, and after the Fur Trade in the...
Women’s Hands in the Rock Art of Mensabak Lake, Chiapas, Mexico: An Approach from the Agency Theory (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Representations of hands in rock art is a polysemy motif registered among different archaeological sites in Chiapas, Mexico. Painted hands are a recurrent representation in the cliffs of Mensabak Lake in the Lacandon Rainforest, where these paintings were made by both positive and negative techniques. This paper will discuss the semantics of hand...
Women’s Territorialities within Indigenous Societies in Brazil: Past Discourses, Present Relations (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to contribute to a still scarce reflection on the practices, their effects and meanings, of women within indigenous and traditional societies in their territorial processes, from interdisciplinary and collaborative perspectives. This research is sought to consolidate an already existing network of collaboration between historians,...
The Wooden Club: The Oldest Weapon or Myth? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is a popular idea that archaic humans commonly used wooden clubs as their weapons. This is not based on archaeological finds, which are minimal from the Pleistocene, but rather on a few ethnographic analogies and the association of this weapon with simple technology. This paper presents the first quantitative cross-cultural analysis of the use of...
Working with Scotty: Perspectives on A Peripheral Paper Designed for the Ayacucho-Huanta Archaeological-Botanical Project (2018)
I was not involved directly with Scotty’s Ayacucho project (1969–1975), but from 1965 to 1968 I worked in the town of Quinua, engaged in dissertation research. Its territory included part of the site of Huari. After completing my dissertation, I returned to continue work in 1973, 1974, and 1980, and later, focusing on its ecological system, especially irrigation. Scotty invited me to prepare a paper on the ways farmers used ecological zones. The research, while more detailed, complemented what I...
Zapotitlan Earth Ovens and Their Middens: Ethnoarchaeology in Colima, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...