From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas

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 "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since its inception, bioarcheology has been an essential approach to reconstructing otherwise inaccessible details of past human behavior. Recent years have seen an increasing interest in re-engaging with social theories prompting some to call for a new "Social Bioarchaeology". However, as the fields of mortuary archaeology and bioarchaeology have grown, those past engagements have faded in favor of the more routine application of techniques. Interestingly, while centered on corporeal remains of humans, mortuary and bioarchaeologists have only recently explored the nature of varied emic notions or ontologies of the body. The participants in this symposium explore worldviews across the Americas using non-Western ontologies of corporeality to inspire new approaches in bioarchaeology and social theories of the body.

Other Keywords
Ideology, Ontology, and Memory • Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis • Mortuary Analysis • Woodland • Ceramic Analysis • Pueblo • arctic • Indigenous • Materiality • paleomobility

Geographic Keywords
Republic of Peru (Country) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Republic of Colombia (Country) • Republic of Ecuador (Country) • North America (Continent) • South America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • USA (Country) • Kentucky (State / Territory) • Kansas (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Andean Indigenous Bodies: Methodological Approaches to Past Perceptions of the Body (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Lozada. Danielle Kurin. Enmanuel Gomez. Maria Lozada.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Any attempt to understand indigenous anatomy and perceptions of the body from an emic perspective in the Andes is a challenging endeavor, beginning with basic definitions that differ substantially from Western traditions. Furthermore, definitions changed across space and time throughout Andean...

  • Bodies of Evidence: Indications of Non-Western Ontologies at Paquimé, Chihuahua (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Gordon Rakita. Adrianne Offenbecker. Kyle Waller.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnographic descriptions of historic and contemporary peoples with clear connections to prehistoric cultural groups offer ready sources to explore non-Western views of reality. Researchers working in the American Southwest and much of Mesoamerica benefit from robust ethnographic accounts that can be...

  • Isotopes and the Body Politic: Estimating Residential Origins at the Imperial Inka site of Patallacta, Peru (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Turner.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In just under a century, the Inka subjugated twelve million people across the Central Andes. As part of their governing strategies, Inca administrators relocated individuals and even entire communities throughout the empire for myriad purposes; this practice often produced constructed communities...

  • Materiality of Amerindian Human Bodies in the Mouth of the Amazon River: Life and Death at the Curiaú Mirim I Site, Around the Second Millennium AD (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Avelino Gambim Junior.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. These paper aims to show an osteobiographical approach to read human bodies like a special kind of material culture which was inspired by the concepts of Amerindian ideas of construction of bodies and persons in the interpretation of the data analyzed. The Curiaú Mirim site is formed by funerary...

  • Movement and Animacy of Bodies in Pre-Columbian Florida (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Neill Wallis. John Krigbaum.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pre-Columbian Florida burial mounds exhibit multiple modes of burial, including extended, flexed, mixed (and mass) bundles, skull only, and cremation, as well as emplaced objects in various conditions and configurations. These different forms often occur within a single mound, and have been explained...

  • Necrontology: Housing the Dead in Precontact Labrador and Greenland (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge. Mari Kleist.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Conventional treatment of the dead varied substantially across the Inuit world. Bodies might be deposited in carefully constructed cairns next to settlements or more simply exposed on the land or sea ice. It also varied locally depending on understandings of the afterlife, how individuals were...

  • Ontology, Time Travel, and Transformation in the Lower Illinois Valley (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason King. Jane Buikstra. Robert Pickering.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we explore the implications of time travel (Holtorf) and ontology (Viveiros de Castro, Latour, Pedersen) for bioarchaeological perspectives of Middle Woodland (Hopewellian) peoples of the lower Illinois River valley (LIV), who occupied this region two millennia ago. Following...

  • Pueblo Warriors, Witches and Cannibals: Indigenous Concepts of Corporeality and the Biorchaeological Record (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Martin.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Pueblo oral tradition, a persistent narrative exists regarding malevolent forces that commit transgressions while inhabiting the corporeal bodies of community members. Referred to as witches (although this is not a term Pueblo people would use) they bring about crop failures through droughts, and...

  • Ritual Commensality in the Lower Amazon on the South of Amapá State, Brazil, During the Precolonial Period (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jelly Juliane Souza De Lima.

    This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many Amerindian worldviews, commensality pervades to different degrees both mundane and ritual spheres, being a way of caring and building relationships as revealed by available information from ethnology and ethnohistory. Based on these issues, this paper explores the central concepts of body...