The Caiman’s (and Frog’s) Revenge: Intersecting Papers in Honor of Peter G. Roe
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)
Peter G. Roe earned his PhD at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana under the direction of Donald W. Lathrap. Following in Lathrap’s large footsteps, over the past four decades Roe has carried out novel and pioneering research in a number of areas, including cosmology and religion; art, iconography, and design analysis; technology; ethnohistory; and ethnoarchaeology. Uniting these threads has been his abiding commitment to South American and Caribbean archaeology and ethnography. In this session, colleagues and former students present papers that relate to Professor Roe’s varied interests.
Other Keywords
Horticulture •
Caribbean Archaeology •
Shamanism •
Myth •
Trinidad •
Aesthetics •
Ethnogenesis •
coastal Ecuador •
Caribbean •
Early Formative
Geographic Keywords
Department of Martinique (Country) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Department of Guadeloupe (Country) •
Antigua and Barbuda (Country) •
Belize (Country) •
Anguilla (Country) •
Republic of Honduras (Country) •
St. Lucia (Country) •
Montserrat (Country) •
Jamaica (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)
- Documents (8)
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The Angel of History and the Paradise of Progress in the Scholarship of Peter Roe (2017)
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In honor of the innovative contribution by Peter Roe to the ethno-archaeological research on Amazonia, my paper will focus on the indigenous knowledge forms which invert our own logics about material objects. Roe’s early willingness to allow indigenous thought to impact our scientific interpretations was well ahead of its time. Today, we on the ethnographic side of Amazonian scholarship, have little difficulty speaking in terms of the "social life of things." Yet, even beyond, the legitimacy...
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Animal Imagery and the Mythic Level of Jama-Coaque Figural Style (2017)
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The mythological and iconographic analyses of Peter G. Roe have made seminal contributions to our understanding of Amerindian cosmology and religious thought in South America, both in the ethnographic present and in the prehispanic past. His unitary mythic model set forth in the Cosmic Zygote (1982) and explored in subsequent publications has convincingly demonstrated that this quintessentially Amazonian model has "deep-time" attributes that shed interpretive light on iconographic...
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"Bai Kui", the True Garden; "Ava-Ti", the White Population: Horticultural Intensification in Lowland South America (2017)
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The "true garden" or "Bai Kui" of the Kashinawá, Pano language speakers in the state of Acre, Brazil, is described here as an example of the original horticulture which occupied the arc of dry forests in southeastern Amazon. Improved forms of manioc, peanuts, and peppers evolved during 9,000 years of cultivation and were exchanged with farmers on the Pacific Coast to improve garden diversity in an ancient and far-flung cultural interaction sphere. The connectivity required for long-distance...
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Bayamanaco and the Cayman: The Mythic origin of Manioc Cultivation, Amazonia-Antilles (2017)
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Recent trace analysis of Greater Antillean culinary implements finds a paucity of evidence for manioc until late times. This is anomalous since it was believed that manioc accompanied the first truly horticultural and ceramic-producing groups, the Saladoids, from the Orinocan lowlands of South America through the Lesser Antilles to Puerto Rico at 800-500 B.C. Such late occurrence also contradicts the fact that manioc is a lowland cultigen, spanning northern tropical South America. Actual tubers...
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The Cultural Kaleidoscope in the "Island of Guiana" (2017)
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The Guiana Shield is an island demarcated by the massive river systems of the Orinoco and Amazon and the northeast coastline of South America. Numerous Amerindian groups with distinct identities have occupied the region for thousands of years. In the contexts of maintaining distinct identities and active processes of ethnogenesis, well-established webs of relations and exchange exist across the region. Relations of production and distribution long documented ethnohistorically and...
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Origin of the Pitch Lake: An Amerindian Myth from Trinidad (2017)
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Although Trinidad is referred to in various myths of the Warao and Arawak of the Orinoco delta and the Guiana coastal zone, only one mythical tradition is known which was documented among the Amerindians formerly living on the island. Explaining the origin of the major asphalt seepage known as the Pitch Lake in southwest Trinidad, this myth appears to be closely related to part of a mythological cycle related by the Lokóno (Arawak) of Guyana and northwest Suriname which narrates the...
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Shamans, Jaguars, Owls, Cosmograms, and Zygotes: Matapalo and the Origins of Late Valdivia Stone Plaques (2017)
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The material record of Ecuador’s Early Formative Valdivia culture has long been approached from the perspective of a New World, particularly an Amazonian, shamanism incorporating foundational features of animistic ontology. More recently enigmatic stone plaques from Northern Manabí Province have been included in the non-secular repertoire of later Valdivia phases; however, their temporal and spatial associations remained poorly known. Investigations in the Coaque Valley clearly establish their...
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"Winged Worldviews": Human-Bird Entanglements in Northern Venezuela, A.D. 1000–1500 (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Drawing from archaeology, zooarchaeology, ethnohistory, ethnology, and avian biogeography, this paper aims at (re)constructing the interrelations between indigenous peoples and birds in north-central Venezuela, between AD 1000 and 1500. Amerindian narratives and premises of perspectival ontology from the South American Lowlands suggest that certain birds were more closely interrelated with humans then other beings. The analyses of nearly 3000 avian bone remains recovered in six late Ceramic Age...