and Memory (Other Keyword)
26-45 (45 Records)
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...
More than Kindling: Algarrobo Posts and Social Memory on the Peruvian North Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD 650-850) on the north coast of Peru was the center for elaborate feasting events and rituals of human sacrifice. This ceremonial center has been the focus of intensive archaeological study, yet the spatial distribution of wooden posts within the Moche architectural platforms remains under-analyzed, despite the...
The Past and Present Social Role of Viking Age Mounds (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. Jellhaug, Norway, is Scandinavia’s second largest prehistoric mound. Dating from the (pre)Viking period, it has a long history of human interaction and interpretation. Built in phases with distinct, selected, and transformed earthly materials, the mound compares with contemporary mounds in that both the...
Persistence in Ruins: Animation, Remembrance, and Rupture at Etlatongo, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rather than static vestiges of the past, we view ruins and material objects from the past as important generative components of communities and human projects. Informed by a relational ontology that views some objects and matter as charged and animate, we situate our research at Etlatongo in broader Mixtec and Mesoamerican...
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...
Precontact Inuit Watercraft and the Hunter-Prey Actantial Hinge (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maritime harvesting from watercraft and sea ice was the foundation of precontact Inuit economy throughout the Eastern Arctic, and small watercraft also figured in locally important terrestrial caribou hunts. Boats were everywhere essential to work, travel, and trade during the open...
The Presence of Sacrifice in Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan: Two Faces of the Same Story (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 Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan’s religious thought, sacrifice was a creative act closely related to cosmic genesis and world sense. This behavior is evident not only in the archaeological record but also in the iconography. Two of the most common artifacts associated with this ancient practice in both...
Radical Cosmological Ritual Intervention at Poverty Point (2024)
This is an abstract from the "*SE Not Your Father’s Poverty Point: Rewriting Old Narratives through New Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana is unique—in size, monumental architecture, artifact content, and history—and the site defies standard functional explanations for hunter-gatherer settlements. In contrast to existing concepts arguing that the site’s monumental constructions were built over...
Reconsidering the Role of Archaeology in Shaping “Affective Places”: Case Scenarios from Hawai'i and Yucatán (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. Western-trained scholars like to take for granted that the discipline of archaeology plays a foundational role in providing data from ancient sites from which scientists reconstruct histories, social organization, and what drew people to such places. Government institutions use such information to assign values to...
Religious Belief and Cooperation: A View from Ancient Greece (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work in the interdisciplinary field of the Cognitive Science of Religion has proposed that the in-group cooperation needed for the development of the large, complex human societies that first appeared during the Holocene was fostered by belief in the existence of supernatural beings that monitor humans and punish misbehavior. Two competing...
Rethinking Our Concepts to Rethink Our Data: Interpreting the Material Culture of Northwest Mexico in Light of Indigenous Theory (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...
Reuse, Rubble, and Relations to Place at Ancient Maya Cities (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Reinvent, Reclaim, Redefine: Considerations of "Reuse" in Archaeological Contexts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper traces histories of reused stone and space at ancient Maya cities. Space/Place theorists have documented the ways that physical spaces have layers of meaning tied to their history of use. In the Maya area, archaeologists have documented myriad ways in which Maya individuals have engaged with and...
Ruins in the Daily Life of San Antonio La Baeza from the Prehispanic Past to the Modern Day (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What role do ruins play in the lives of descendant peoples? Surrounding the small mountain pueblo of San Antonio La Baeza are numerous ruins dating to different time periods. For example, below the modern pueblo are large, deep rockshelters that have been occupied from the Late Formative up until today and are covered in...
Shellscapes and Kinscapes: A Social Network Analysis of the Southern Northwest Coast (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social network analyses in archaeology have been successfully used to examine the connections between diverse social actors in the past. These studies have largely focused on the relationships between humans and other humans, typically using cultural materials as proxies for people....
Specters and Spectators: Paranornal Tourism and Historic Sites of Confinement in the American South (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, authors Cayla Colclasure (she/her) and Zoe Schwandt (they/she) consider the phenomenon of paranormal tourism and related media as one way various publics engage with historic sites of confinement in the American South and attempt to bridge the epistemological divide between these forms of engagement with the past and the discipline of...
Theory, Strategies, Objectives, and Preliminary Results of Transdisciplinary Studies of Ancient Consciousness on Time and Space out of Eurasia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient consciousness may be a key concept to discern human biocultural evolutionary processes. We reassess how indigenous people out of Eurasia developed consciousness about time and space and created conceptual dividing apparatuses, like calendar systems. We begin with theoretical...
Weaving Ancestors into Everyday Objects: Basketmaker II Use of Human Hair (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Cordage, Yarn, and Associated Paraphernalia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-pottery farmers on the Colorado Plateau of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers fabricated various artifacts using human hair cordage. The textiles made of this material ranged from intimate personal adornments to utilitarian rabbit nets and load-bearing tumplines. Aside from important functional properties of elasticity and...
When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality, and the Numic Ritual Life Cycle (2024)
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. This paper explores the critical subject of indigenous oral traditions in California and the Great Basin. Using an interdisciplinary approach that considers Numic oral teachings relative to place-based data in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and geology, the author interrogates traditional narratives encoding...
Wooden Posts and an Ontology of “Treeness” (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Wooden posts have been a critical element of Andean architecture within the Jequetepeque valley on the north coast of Peru, particularly in the Moche site of Huaca Colorada (AD 650–850). However, wooden posts have frequently been interpreted in the...
"The World is a Garden": Human-Animal Relations and Sustainability Comparative Studies of Classic Maya and Early China (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interactions among organisms along with environmental factors in non-Western cultures, require to be re-examined since Western humanity-nature binary explanations fail to take into account indigenous ontologies. In the title, I prioritize environment among these three objects because I want to demonstrate that it is a prerequisite, helping shape the...