Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) is a long-term anthropological analysis of clandestine border crossings between Northern Mexico and Southern Arizona that began in 2009. The UMP uses a combination of ethnographic and archaeological approaches to understand the distinct experiences of migrant subpopulations. This study focuses on child migrants and how...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Brighton.

Cultural resilience or collapse has been the focus for the study of prehistoric and proto-historic societies. Little, if any work in historical archaeology, or the archaeology of the modern world, has linked the impact of traumatic natural events and social, economic, and political structures to how cultural groups respond. In this paper, cultural resilience theory is employed to discuss the capacity of a culture to maintain and transform its world-view, cultural identity, and critical cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers what archaeologists can contribute to contemporary issues through doing what we do best—analyzing material culture to create narratives. I use this approach to personify a particular group of liminal, stereotyped people whose anonymity is critical for their survival—undocumented migrants. This paper is part of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Maya of northwestern Guatemala, modern populations continue to use the mountains found in their territories as places of worship. Often altars are located directly on the peaks of hills and mountains, while in other cases they are found on pilgrimage routes in or around these high sacred points, such as on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liam Brady. Luke Taylor. Sally May. Paul Tacon.

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A core feature of rock art studies concerns the characterization and analysis of motif styles to generate new insights into their function, meaning, and symbolism in the deep and recent past. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is attention to the production sequence used to create motifs, and what this can reveal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Ortiz Brito.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 1" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation addresses the relation between archaeological patrimony and collective memory using the San Martín Pajapan (SMP) monument as a case study. The SMP monument is an Olmec monument found on the top of the San Martín Pajapan volcano of Los Tuxtlas region. According to ethnographic research done in the 1960s, the local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terje Oestigaard.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cannibalism is a contested theme in anthropology, there is one area and era that has received little attention: Scandinavian folklore in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The widely documented practices...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Whitehead.

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. Medicinal Plant use for Southeastern New Mexico is presented, covering major plant types, uses, and ecology. In collaboration with a botanist, who specializes in New Mexico flora, we present data on 331 plant species. The process of knowledge production will be addressed, as all of this information is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Brock Morales.

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1970, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake destroyed numerous towns and displaced many families throughout the Callejon de Huaylas, Peru. In the search for new land and new lives, many of the displaced families began to settle on elevated archaeological sites of monumental architecture located in alluvial plains and near...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Garraty. J. Andrew Darling. Craig Fertelmes. Barnaby Lewis.

This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology: How Native American Knowledge Enhances Our Collective Understanding of the Past" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists who study the relationship of memory to material culture or landscapes examine the ways in which history and cultural practice contribute to tradition-building and its perpetuation. Cultural practices are the daily embodiment of one’s traditions, beliefs, or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Levi Romero.

This is an abstract from the "Chicanx Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What is the connection between place and identity? The story of human existence is one of movement and settlement. Origin stories the world over feature accounts of where a people came from as a way of telling how they came to be. Northern New Mexico cultural envoy, Juan Estevan Arellano, used the traditional northern New Mexico concept of querencia to define the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ting An.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Lower Yangtze valley is widely recognized as the earliest center of rice agriculture. The process of rice domestication, based on the morphology of spikelet bases, has been traced to between 9000 and 5000 BP. However, the domestication status of rice before 9000 BP remains a subject of debate due to the near absence...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe. Alice R. Kelley.

Although some attention has been given to the possibility that circular, semi-circular, and U-shaped piles of shell in southeastern North America represent monumental architecture (e.g., Thompson and Pluckhahn 2012), little attention has been afforded to the possibility that large shell middens of the eastern North American coast might be monumental constructions. Here, using an argument drawn from New Guinea ethnography, we hypothesize that some Maine middens were not simply rubbish heaps, but...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Zahn-Hiepler.

This is an abstract from the "There and Back Again: Celebrating the Career and Ongoing Contributions of Patricia B. Richards" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The original design and use of the Garden Cemetery deathscape encouraged recreation and social interaction among the living and the dead. Forest Home Cemetery, a historic (1850–present) Garden Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hosts more than a dozen events in the cemetery each year, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josuhé Lozada. Joel Palka. Fabiola Sánchez.

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. Mirador Mountain, or Chak Aktun for contemporary Lacandon Maya, dominates the landscape at Lake Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. The mountain, which has a natural red stain on its east side, rises from an island. Late Preclassic Maya (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE) created temples, platforms, and plazas on the island Mountain for an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nomaan Hasan.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As material forms become central to the ongoing formulation of history and national identity in contemporary India, archaeology is acquiring an increasingly prominent place in the popular imagination. Initially motivated by the current regime’s interest in ascertaining the provenance of and recovering buildings allegedly usurped by Muslims, numerous...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Maitland.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of pitch to coat historic water vessels represents the complex relationships between indigenous peoples and native plants in the American Southwest. Chemical analyses and comparisons were conducted with the intention of sourcing the pitch coating to a specific conifer species. Ponderosa (Pinus ponderosa) and Piñon (Pinus edilus), two species of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abigail Lewis. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monkeys are prominently featured in Maya creation narratives, in Maya art, and more rarely in burial contexts. Despite their apparent importance in Maya ideology, however, previous research on monkeys in the Maya world has primarily focused on their primatological, and linguistic significance. In contrast to those studies, this research investigates the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesse Byock.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Presents recent findings of the Mosfell Archaeological Project (MAP) in Iceland’s Mosfell Valley (Mosfellsdalur). Reviews excavations at Leiruvogur Bay at the coastal mouth of the valley and at Hrísbrú, the farmstead of the Mosfell chieftains. These two Viking Age sites formed a 10th century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Lash.

Movement is fundamental to bodily perception and to the formation of the archaeological record. Histories of movement shape our perceptual apparatus and generate embodied knowledge. This recursive constitution of bodies, movements, and materials simultaneously defines the challenge and opportunity of phenomenological approaches within sensory archaeology. Explicitly or not, most researchers use their own bodily experiences of movement as analogies for making inferences about the material and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Doris Walter. Rebecca Bria.

This paper discusses the importance of combining ethnographic, archaeological, and "hard" scientific knowledge when teaching about climate change. Archaeology courses that discuss climate change typically bring together data from the physical sciences, such as from ice or lake cores, with archaeological evidence of social change, such as shifting settlement patterns or food strategies. Though an understanding of these links is critical to scientific literacy and knowledge about the past, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howell. Igor Sarmientos.

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. In this discussion the locations of murals in the three houses restored at Chajul are pinpointed, and the placement of musicians and instruments in those murals identified. The authors introduce music archaeology, and explain why its methods are necessary for identification and interpretive purposes; setting up a focus on the three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Browne Ribeiro.

In contemporary Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, life is largely shaped by movement of, and among, plants. Plants here are mobile, but spend most of their lives stationary. In this paper, I examine the relationship between people and plants – as living, but nonetheless spatially rooted elements of the landscape – in these agroextractivist communities. I explore the significance of planting and plant life in regulating territorial use and notions of rights, access, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Dean.

The last two decades in the south central Andes have witnessed the rapid growth of "Turismo Mistico" or New Age Tourism to archaeological sites and monuments in the south central Andes. Using the Cusco Valley of Peru as a case study, this paper analyzes textual, visual, experiential, and ethnographic data in order to assess the economic and socio-political impact this industry has on the communities in which it thrives. In particular, I explore the implications New Age Tourism has on local and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Zubieta Calvert.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The artistic expressions of the Ayuujk (Mixe) peoples are little known in Mexican archaeological research. In this presentation I discuss the possible narratives behind the presence of plastic art and rock art, unprecedent in Mesoamérica, located in the context of a subterranean landscape in the Sierra Mixe of Oaxaca. In particular I will focus on the...