E pur si muove: Exploring Mobilities in Latin America
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Throughout history, Latin America has been the scene of a remarkable mobility of people, animals, things, ideas, languages, and even entire communities. Mobility, however, is an elusive research topic that is "as much about meaning as it is about mappable and calculable movement" (Cresswell 2011:551). Mobilities shape physical and cultural landscapes, and at the same time they are bound up with the production and negotiation of power relationships. As such, when attempting to reconstruct the dynamics of movement in the past, not one single discipline can fully untangle the complex interplay between motion, situation, context, and meaning. This session will therefore explore archaeological approaches that integrate historical, ethnographic, biological, geographical, linguistic, and other methodologies to reconstruct the social and economic dimensions of mobility politics in Latin America.
Other Keywords
Mobility •
andes •
Mesoamerica •
Trade •
Textiles •
Exchange •
Territoriality •
Pastoralism •
Colonialism •
Gis
Geographic Keywords
South America •
Mesoamerica
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-10 of 10)
- Documents (10)
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A Bioarchaeological Approach to Ychsma Regional Interactions: Stable Oxygen and Radiogenic Strontium Isotopes and Late Intermediate Period Mobility on the Central Peruvian Coast (2016)
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Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence indicates that, for the Inca Empire and the Spanish Viceroyalty, the Rimac and Lurin Valleys on central Peruvian coast served as a key regional hub for religious and administrative activities. The nature of regional interactions prior to Inca imperial influence in this area, however, remains unclear. Well-known historical narratives claim populations from the adjacent Huarochirí highlands defeated coastal Ychsma populations for agricultural land, but...
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From herders to wage-laborers and back again: mountain mobility in the Puna of Atacama, northern Chile. (2016)
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Towards the end of the 19th Century, the subsistence mode of indigenous Atacameño society transited from an agricultural-pastoral economy to a more diversified capitalist-based one. This transformation resulted from a growing mining industry in the northern region of Chile. While part of the indigenous population migrated to the new productive enclaves, others remained in their territory, especially the herders of the puna. These highlanders, however, also took part of the new capitalist order...
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Itinerancy and pottery production in the Andes (2016)
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Swallows are a type of potter that travels seasonally to places away from their “home base” to practice their craft. For more than a century, and, in several parts of the world, ethnographers have documented this phenomenon, however, archaeologists have only addressed it tangentially. Yet swallows are important for archaeologists to consider, since they demonstrate that cultural interaction is not always limited to the distribution of pottery, but can also be important during the manufacturing...
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Movement of Goods and Ideas in Early Formative Western and Central Mesoamerica: New Evidence from Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico (2016)
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For decades, scholars have discussed Mesoamerica as a land characterized by two ancient linguistic and cultural traditions: Mixe-Zoque to the southeast, and Otomanguean to the west. Recent evidence from the initial Early Formative (2000–1500 cal BC) village site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca suggests that early “Red-on-Buff horizon” ceramics of Otomanguean-speaking peoples compete temporally with the earliest southern pottery traditions, such as that of the Soconusco region’s Barra phase...
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Moving the Animal: Camelid Herding on the North Coast of Peru and the Temporalities of Human-Animal Interactions during the Moche Period (2016)
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The north coast of Peru during the Middle Horizon Period witnessed a shift in the way that people, things and animals moved across the landscape. The often fragmented polities that formed the occupation sites for communities engaged in Moche ideology and politics were also associated with trade and interregional interaction on a different scale. The role of animals in this exchange is often overlooked and taken for granted. Camelids (alpacas and llamas) were the conduits of mobility within the...
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Paths and plants: territory and mobility among the Laklãnõ/Xokleng in Brazil (2016)
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The Laklãnõ Xokleng Indigenous people occupy a tropical forest area of the Southern valley of Brazil, in Santa Catarina. Historically, they were documented as a hunter-gatherer population with high mobility system who occupied and managed an extended and diverse territory, including high plateaus, forested valleys and coastal areas. Archaeologically it is still difficult to affirm if this documented mobility pattern is an (in)direct result of European contact and reorganization of indigenous...
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Surveillance and control in a landscape of war: An examination of mobility and fortification in the Colca Valley, Peru (2016)
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Mobility is frequently examined in terms of interaction, confluence and circulation. During periods of conflict, however, roads and paths can become arenas for the negotiation and control of people, lands and resources, and thus bring into sharp relief the often tense politics of mobility. This paper draws on regional survey of Late Intermediate Period (AD 1100-1450) hilltop fortifications in the Colca Valley to examine the use of fortification to monitor and control mobility during a period of...
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Textile conceptual ideas as mobility indicators between highlands and coast, Central Andes, c. 200BC-600AD (2016)
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Textiles are important artifacts when looking at mobility since they constitute a matrix of complex conceptual ideas, are important identity markers, and they travel easily with their owners. Pre-Columbian textiles have seldom been preserved in the wet Andean highlands, making it difficult to evaluate their past diversity and to identify them among the vast quantity of pieces discovered on the arid coast of Peru. Nevertheless, combining the study of present highland weaving practices with the...
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To move mountains: cycles of indigenous mobility and resettlement in highland Mexico (2016)
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The quaint and seemingly static Oaxacan Chontal villages, tucked away in the highlands of southern Mexico, conceal behind a long history of population movements and resettlement. For the last five centuries and more, entire communities migrated and changed places as an adaptive response to intricate ecological, economic, political, and social factors. While the dispersed settlement pattern largely ‘fused’ together in the 16th century colonial congregations, many other communities went through a...
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Volcanic Glass and Iron Nails: Shifting Networks of Exchange at Postclassic and Colonial Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico (2016)
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In this paper I present data from recent excavations at the highland Mixtec site of Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico, to shed light on how indigenous residents there negotiated changes and continuities in exchange relationships from the Postclassic (AD 900-1521) to Early Colonial (AD 1521-1650) periods. Various lines of evidence demonstrate that Achiutla had significant economic ties to both the Basin of Mexico and the Oaxaca coast, and that the site was an important locus along trade routes between the...