Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings

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 "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session purposefully expands the notion of crafting, excavating its entangled relationship to the production and maintenance of culture, while addressing its relationships to ancient subjectivity. Through multiple pathways, the papers in the session focus on contexts of production, placement, and affect, exploring the many ways in which archaeologists understand, analyze and interpret ideas of "making" and "production" in relation to materials, artifacts, bodies, and places, to name a few. Drawing from case studies that are both spatially and temporally diverse, the papers in this session illustrate the many approaches to things (human/nonhuman) taken by archaeologists, from embodiment to materiality and agency studies. These case studies allow us to juxtapose ontological and cognitive/behavioral approaches to understanding ancient crafting. At the core of these approaches is the desire to understand the many facets, standpoints, performances, feelings, and modalities of being that together inform cultures through the production/making/crafting of things. This session does not aim to bring a unified voice to the ways in which archaeologists link craft to culture; rather, it revels in the diversity of efforts utilized to answer those questions.

Other Keywords
Craft Production • Ethnohistory/History • Landscape Archaeology • Bronze Age • Maya: Classic • Archaeometry & Materials Analysis • Geoarchaeology • Survey • Historic • Materiality

Geographic Keywords
Asia (Continent) • North America (Continent) • Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Country) • Republic of India (Country) • People's Republic of Bangladesh (Country) • Kingdom of Bhutan (Country) • Kingdom of Nepal (Country) • United Mexican States (Country) • Belize (Country) • Islamic Republic of Pakistan (Country)

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

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Beading a Nation, Beading a People: The Role of Métis Women’s Beadwork in Crafting Culture (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dawn Wambold. Eric Tebby. Kisha Supernant.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The embodied act of crafting can bring into being a physical representation of relations and ways of being in the world. In 1945, ethnologist John C. Ewers reported that the Sioux word for the Métis in Canada translates as "the flower beadwork people". With influences from their First Nations and settler ancestors, Métis beadwork has...

  • Crafting Human/Hieroglyph Relationships in Classic Maya Contexts (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Jackson.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...

  • Crafting Labor and Landscape (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzma Rizvi.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper revisits how landscape and mineral extraction have been contextualized in the third millennium BCE, Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex (GJCC), Rajasthan, India. The GJCC has very specific formations of sites around resource-high regions particular to this landscape and time period that demonstrate a focus on copper production...

  • Knowledge Networks and Entanglements in the Crafting of Pre-Columbian Maya Ceramics and Architecture (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Celine Gillot. Christina Halperin.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the underlying precepts of materiality is that, whereas people make objects, objects simultaneously and recursively make people. Objects also make objects, however, in so far as seemingly separate crafting traditions were intimately entangled with each other, stimulating and reinforcing similar procedures, practices, and...

  • Making Kin out of Stone: Production of Landscape and Collectivity in Ancient Peru (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only George Lau.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation details different strands of evidence we have on the organisation and kin-based significances of carved stone monoliths during the late prehispanic period of ancient northern Peru (ca. AD 500-1532). Ethnohistorical documents suggest that it was close kin who carved and erected stone images of esteemed forebears; the...

  • Place Making and Ephemerality (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Wright.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At first the two ideas of this paper’s title can seem contradictory, but as three separate words they come together. What is the valency between the hypothesised solidity of an archaeological place and the stream of events that go into making it, transforming it, and erasing it? The ephemeral nature of the archaeological sites created...

  • Rice Cultivation and the Craft of the State (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoë Crossland.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 19th century oral histories from the highlands of Madagascar traced a history of sovereignty and governance through a narrative of major landscape transformation. The construction of dikes, canals and rice fields around the capital city was figured as part of the work of building the kingdom. This was an expansive and expanding craftwork...

  • Salutary Failures: Bronze Age Metallurgists in China and Their Faulty Seams (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Yao.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Creativity and imagination are subjects which do not often appear in the archaeology of craft. Though archaeologists study innovation in relation to a craft’s technological developments and discoveries, we approach such novelties as progress bound rather than creative pursuits. Craft workers are, after all, toiling for other people in...

  • Taking Things Apart: Reconfiguring Production Practices in South India (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Praveena Gullapalli.

    This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I explore how taking apart the bundle of practices grouped together as ‘metallurgy’ might lead to a better understanding of not only that technology but also of ancient South Indian society. While cross-craft approaches to technologies allow archaeologists to explore potential relationships between production activities...