Ideology (Other Keyword)
1-25 (77 Records)
In the Early Intermediate Period (AD 1-700) there was a notable development of belief systems or "ideologies of power." These systems reinforced and naturalized the relations of the dominant classes over the less important social groups. The use of ideology to exert control is an efficient tool, especially when applied to concepts of life and death. Funerary practices effectively serve to promote social cohesion, whether related to kinship ties or political and economic means. The intent of...
Ancient Maya Placemaking: An Isotopic Assessment of Ancestry, Memory, and Body Partibility (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migrations are a key feature of human populations past and present, and people moved across landscapes regardless of cultural affiliation, hierarchical structures, or place of birth. But, what does it mean when individuals and/or pieces of their remains are moved elsewhere posthumously? This paper builds upon discourse centered around social memory and...
Archaeological Immersion and the Rhythmanalysis of Place: Experimental Virtual Reality Spatial Analysis at Jatanca (Je-1023), Peru (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. The phenomenon of place as it is rhythmically embodied, akin to a fabric that is collectively worn and interwoven over successive generations, unfolds at the center of our presentation. We explore the intricate meshwork of place-making, applying an...
Archaeology and the Politics of Erasure in the Middle East (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking with, through, and against Archaeology’s Politics of Knowledge" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a discipline initially tasked with understanding non-Western histories and heritage, archaeology has functioned mainly as a technology of forgetting rather than remembering when it came to indigenous material cultures. The role of archaeology in colonizing African and South American cultures is widely explored,...
Assembling the Dead and the Living: Funerary Practices within Eastern Populations of the Southern Andes (Tucumán, Northwestern Argentina) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite extensive archaeological research, surprisingly little is known about regional and interregional mortuary practices in the Southern Andes, specifically in Northwestern Argentina. Large-scale excavation carried out in El Cadillal, undertaken between 1971 and 1972, resulted in the recovery of 44 prehispanic burials associated with Candelaria dated...
Beekeeping, Ancestral Knowledge, and Interspecies Relationships: Exploring Place-Based Heritage in Yucatán (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In her article “Saving the Other Bees,” Eve Bratman (2020) explores the successful reintroduction of beekeeping practices associated with the stingless species Melipona beecheii in the Yucatán Peninsula, which has resulted in the species thriving following near extinction. She...
Building Power: The Teotepec Palace as Materialized Ideology (2016)
Discussions of Classic Period (ca. AD 300-900) architecture in southern Veracruz, Mexico generally emphasize patterning in mound-plaza arrangements, with an array of configurations vying for preeminence across the coastal lowlands. Often lacking from these analyses, however, is a more nuanced consideration of the built environment's ideological implications. This paper examines palaces as important reflections of power's materialization in southern Veracruz. Specifically, we consider the palace...
Can Archaeology Slow Down Fast Capitalism? (2016)
The great intellectual myth of the end of the 20th century was that the 21st century dawned in a world of "posts"; post industrial, post colonial and most importantly post capitalist. The sociologist Ben Agger has argued that we do not live in a post capitalist world but rather in a world of hyped up Capitalism or Fast Capitalism. More recently, the economist Thomas Piketty has redirected economic research back to the study of wealth and Capital. his work sustains Karl Marx's fundamental...
Cave of Wonder: A Sacred Topos of Maritime Identities on Kalymnos (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Social Archaeologies and Islands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caves often occupied prominent locations as visible landmarks or as nodal points in exchange networks and mobility routes. The paper discusses coastal sacred caves, which through the transportation of diverse material culture, provided the backdrop where maritime identities were played out. The study investigates the Late Minoan occupation phase of...
Changing Faces: Evolutions in Art at Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala (2017)
The site of Kaminaljuyu experienced intensive ideological and material cultural change from the Preclassic through the early Classic period. Certain artistic forms and ideological precepts, however, simultaneously demonstrate remarkable continuity. This talk focuses specifically on public messages communicated through stone sculpture as well as, to a lesser degree, messages communicated by elite and royal funerary contexts in order to access continuity and change in Kaminaljuyu’s archaeological...
Classical Nahuatl or Language of the Aztecs: Historical Appropriation and the Enduring Legacies of (Neo)Colonialism (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nahuatl, often referred to as the “Aztec language,” is one of the languages most widely identified, both in the academy and in public awareness, with prehispanic cultures. In archaeological and historical research, it often receives the name...
Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica (2007)
Were most commoners in ancient Mesoamerica poor? In a material sense, yes, probably so. Were they poor in their beliefs and culture? Certainly not, as Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica demonstrates. This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the...
Contesting Social Memory in Tres Zapotes and Its Hinterland during the Epi-Olmec Period: Preliminary Results of the Proyecto Arqueologico Nestepe-Rancho Cobata (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the results of the Proyecto Arqueologico Nestepe-Rancho Cobata conducted in the municipality of Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz. The project explores the role of Olmec sculptures in the development and contestation of social memory in Tres Zapotes and its hinterland, during the Epi-Olmec period. Previous research carried out in the area show...
A Contextual Analysis of the Homol'ovi I Fauna (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Pueblo Southwest, ethnographies documenting Indigenous-animal interactions have been used to derive sets of expectations about how Ancestral Pueblo-animals relationships may have appeared in the past. This literature has primarily been used to predict the roles (e.g., subsistence, ritual) and depositional contexts (e.g., structure type) of animals...
Corporal Animal Forms as Ritualized Bodies in Burial 5, Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan (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. Applying a relational ontological approach to faunal bones I identify animals, secondary animal by-products, and faunal artifacts as persons—in the corporal animal forms of puma, eagle, wolf, and rattlesnake—whom actively engaged with entangled sociopolitical communities of humans....
Cosmology in the New World
This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.
Curated Objects in Relational Networks of the Western Arctic (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nineteenth-century Inuit and Yupiit living on the coasts and islands of the North Pacific inhabited a landscape populated by spirits, animal persons, and object-beings. Human observance of rules and rituals was necessary, but not sufficient, to regulate this fluid, animated ecosystem. Magical practices, deeply embedded in relational ontologies,...
Decolonizing Deposition (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists view deposition as existing at an interesting crossroads: it is both fundamental to our basic understandings of site formation and easy to dismiss as unintentional or of secondary importance. Detailed discussions occur most frequently either to explain away issues with the archaeological...
Descifrando las transformaciones y significados en Chavín de Huántar: Un análisis de los marcadores materiales en la Plaza Circular y el atrio (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Chavín de Huántar’s Contribution to Understanding the Central Andean Formative: Results and Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A través del tiempo, la Plaza Circular y su atrio en el monumento Chavín de Huántar han tenido mucha importancia. Durante la fase Blanco - Negro, estas áreas, tuvieron pleno funcionamiento y albergaron una diversidad de contextos, donde destaca el descubrimiento de las galerías de la...
Doctrines of Discard in the Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom: Social Stratigraphies of Refuse Mound Deposition in Southern Nigeria, AD 1400–1900 (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Ìjẹ̀bú Kingdom (southern Nigeria) was for centuries involved in far-reaching trade networks – with the inland and coastal Yorùbá ìlú (city-states), European merchants from various nations, and eventually the British Lagos Colony following its establishment in 1862. During this period, the Ìjẹ̀bú...
Early Monuments at the Maya Archaeological site of El Palmar, Campeche, Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Palmar has garnered considerable attention from researchers, primarily due to its numerous carved monuments. In 1936, Sir Eric Thompson’s exploration initially reported 44 stelae and several altars at its Main Group. However, despite sporadic studies conducted by Tatiana Proskouriakoff and others in subsequent decades, systematic research was lacking,...
The Ethics of Macaw Keeping in the Prehistoric Southwest and Northwest Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "If Animals Could Speak: Negotiating Relational Dynamics between Humans and Animals" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the ethical components of prehistoric macaw husbandry practices in the cultural areas of the US Southwest and Northern Mexico. Within many traditional Native American cosmological schemes, humans and animals occupy a shared social world with reciprocal responsibilities toward one...
The Expression of Ideology in Levantine Submission Scenes: The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III as Feasting in a Neo-Assyrian Context (2015)
Cultural appropriation of Levantine feasting forms by Neo-Assyria was an expression of agency that effectively subsumed, subverted and captured the dynamic of traditional Levantine polities. For those, the feast had represented an act of royal legitimation depicted iconographically by the figure of a king drinking from a cup. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian empire and the prominent appearance of this image, particularly in the 9th century BCE, deserves consideration as a probable co-opting of this...
Fat, Potency, and Respect: The Holy Triad of Human-Animal Relationships in the Paleolithic (2024)
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. Animals played a major role in human subsistence, well-being, and relationship with the world around them since time immemorial. Humans were highly dependent on their animal counterparts for their successful survival and...
The Fluidity of Ideology: A Late Classic Architectural Transformation in Plaza A at the Ancient Maya Site of Pacbitun, Belize (2016)
The ceremonial heart of the ancient Maya site of Pacbitun, thriving for the site’s entire 2000 year existence, must have held an enormous amount of cosmological significance to its inhabitants. However, while the sacredness of this location remained constant, the ideology within this space was incessantly in flux. Over the past 30 years, Plaza A excavations have revealed numerous architectural transformations signifying sociopolitical unrest. One such transformation is archaeologically...