Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session focuses on the edges of the archaeology discipline and the efforts to make the discipline germane and relevant in untraditional ways. Our goal is to highlight innovative ideas and experiences – both the subject matter of research and the methodology used to gather data. Some archaeological projects are politically more charged or emotionally more challenging than most as they explore contemporary societies or current social issues. What they achieve is enhanced relevance and increased inspiration for both scholars and the general public. We aim to showcase such projects in an effort to broaden the applicability of archaeology and at the same time inform the widest possible audience of the fascinating and pertinent nature of archaeological research. All participants and selected additional authors will be requested to submit a chapter to the proceedings of this session. These will be published in a full-color edited volume through the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press and made as accessible as possible to scholarly and lay communities.

Other Keywords
Materiality • Archaeology of the Contemporary • Cultural Resources and Heritage Management • Political economy • Historical Archaeology • Capitalism • Theory • Graffiti • Historic • Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • North America • United Mexican States (Country) • Department of Martinique (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Department of Guadeloupe (Country) • Cayman Islands (Country) • Antigua and Barbuda (Country) • Turks and Caicos Islands (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Archaeology and Contemporary Capitalism (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Gould.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hamilakis and Duke first considered the relationship between "Archaeology and Capitalism" in 2007. In the intervening decade, contemporary capitalism has changed vastly, relocating and concentrating wealth and economic power, constraining national sovereignty in globalized markets, disrupting industries through...

  • Archaeology in a Vacuum: Obstacles to and Solutions for Developing a Real Space Archaeology (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Walsh. Alice Gorman.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The practice of archaeology in outer space seems as far "outside the box" as it is possible for the discipline to go. There are major challenges to carrying out field research in off-Earth contexts – among them, remoteness, hostile conditions, cost, and the demonstrable bias of space agencies against the social...

  • Funding Archaeology and Heritage Conservation in Postcommunist Bulgaria and Beyond (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivan Vasilev.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On 10 November 1989, Todor Zhivkov, the communist leader of Bulgaria, was ousted, bringing the fall of the one-party regime and Bulgaria’s transition to democracy. With the collapse of the communist regime, funding for archaeological research and conservation was dramatically altered and significantly diminished. In...

  • Introduction: Out-of-the Box Archaeology Session (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ran Boytner.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2017, a group of leading archaeologists published a manifesto calling for the advancement of synthetic archaeology. In their manifesto, they wrote that "Among the benefits that archaeologists should deliver to the public are rigorous, evidence-based narratives of what happened in the past and how these events shaped...

  • Old Methods and Theories in the Ethnographic Present: Why We Need An Archaeological Sensibility in the 21st Century (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason De Leon.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often look to sociocultural anthropology for either ethnographic data that support interpretations of the ancient past or for the latest "cutting edge" theory that can be directly grafted onto a data set. In essence, archaeologists excel at mining the ethnographic literature for analogies or new social...

  • Plus ça Change: Archaeology and Incarceration (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Barra ODonnabhain.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spike Island Male Convict Depot opened in 1847 at the height of the Great Famine in Ireland as part of the colonial government’s response to the rise in ‘criminality’ that accompanied mass starvation. The site has a global reach, not just because it was an embarkation point in the transportation of convicts around...

  • Radical Stratigraphy: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Phillips.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the past 100 years, an alternative written record has been tied to the underbelly of Los Angeles’ built environment. The urban infrastructure of railroads, bridges, storm drain tunnels, harbors, and paved rivers houses a vernacular history inscribed mostly on concrete with rocks, chalk, charcoal, pencil, and...

  • Tossed Cigarettes, Illegal Dumps, and Soiled Cardboard: An Archaeology of Illicit, Invisible, and Seldom-Studied Discard Phenomena in the Twenty-First Century (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony Graesch.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has long sought to distance itself from the present, and despite a small corpus of novel and seminal research emerging over the last four decades, an archaeology that addresses the contemporary has remained only on the fringes of the discipline. Highlighting recent investigations in which the...