Connectivity and Communities of Practice in Lowland South America

The concepts of "communities and constellations of practice" are employed in archaeology to engage with the connectivity between material culture, knowledge, agency, structuration, and identity. These frameworks emphasize the socially situated and culturally transmitted nature of how to do and make, and seek to trace their empirical outcomes at different spatio-temporal scales. Archaeologists in Amazonia and circum-Amazonia have long sought to explain the occurrence of large-scale and persistent phenomena, while simultaneously accounting for the cultural-linguistic-ethnic diversity apparent across the regions in which they occur. In this context, how can understanding shared notions of practical action aid the study of generative processes underlying the material record?

We propose that a crucial connection between historically- and contextually-specific processes (e.g., innovation, emulation, syncretism) and long-term trajectories (tradition, orthodoxy) within and between communities may be forged by considering practices and their circumstances of transmission. Moreover, identifying vectors of transmission (social networks, geography) can help suggest how they modified, amplified, or constrained historical outcomes. This session aims to unite scholars in discussion under this broad theme, and as a lens through which to view both variation and homogeneity. Challenges to the definition of the community, whether real, imagined, or archaeological, are also welcome.