Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement

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 "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Nearly 20 years ago, Bender, Winner and their collaborators rattled landscape studies with their book on Contested Landscapes. This formative volume emphasized the non-static, dialogic nature of landscape within a community and acknowledged that the ways that different communities construct, view, and use the landscape can lead to tensions, and even violence. It highlighted the relevance of considering movement, borders, exile, and conflict to understand how people create and reshape their own landscapes. During political conflicts, like colonization and war, people are forced to respond to new politics and hierarchies (sometimes even anarchies) as their personal and communal understanding of the world is deeply transformed through struggle; something visible even today as political tensions constantly reshape local and global landscapes. Perhaps more importantly, understanding the creation and contestation of landscapes in the past is essential for understanding political, economic and cultural manifestations in the present to better organize ourselves for a truly just future. This session brings together researchers whose clear political and theoretical perspectives have led them to explore how conflict laden contexts shape and reshape landscapes during different historical eras around the world.

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Artificial Lines in Saltwater and Sand: Boundaries, Borders, and Beaches in Oceania and Australia (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Flexner.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have long appeared to Western eyes as naturally bounded entities. It has been proposed that they represent ‘natural laboratories’ for understanding natural and cultural evolution. At the same time, islands are recognised as contact zones, for example historian Greg Dening has outlined the significance of...

  • Bottles, Blue Jeans, and a Boat: Material Traces of Contemporary Migration in Western Sicily (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Blake. Robert Schon. Rossella Giglio.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sicilian Channel receives global attention as a major migratory route for undocumented people entering Europe clandestinely, a tragic nexus of transnational displacement and desperation. While the plight of massively overloaded and unseaworthy boats of people justifiably receives media attention, there is a...

  • Colonial Borderlands and Conflicting Landscapes in Colonial Chile (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Beatriz Marin-Aguilera.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chile was the most important and complex borderland of the Spanish Empire (1550–1818), in which colonial power and indigenous resistance were contested over centuries. Control over this frontier was of vital importance for the Spaniards because the main Pacific harbour was located there. The indigenous people,...

  • Colonial Ideology and the Organization of Spanish Missions in Nuevo México and the Pimería Alta (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Evan Giomi. Nicole Mathwich.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists working from a post-colonial framework are increasingly examining how the politics of Indigenous societies in North America structured European colonialism on the continent. In these colonial encounters, conflict and the social transformation that followed often resulted from the dissonance between...

  • Contested Cartographies: Landscapes of power, adaptation, and persistence on the Rosebud Reservation (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lindsay Montgomery.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1878, the Rosebud agency moved to its contemporary location at the junction of Rosebud Creek and the south fork of the White River. Over the course of the next decade, members of the Sincangu (Brulé) Sioux led by the charismatic headmen Spotted Tail came to settle within the reservation. While the reservation’s...

  • Contested Landscapes in the Caribbean: Revisiting Colonial Representations of Indigenous Political Hierarchy, Borders and Movement (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Herrera-Malatesta. Lewis Borck. Corinne L. Hofman.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What we know today of the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean is the result of a process of cultural interpretation and representation originating from the colonial enterprise. For the island of Haytí, later renamed as Hispaniola by Columbus, the first Spanish chroniclers identified a set of indigenous...

  • Contesting Dispossession. Marronage´s Mobility and the Emergence of a Landscape, 17th and 18th Century, Colombia. (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Johana Caterina Mantilla Oliveros.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Access to land is still a problem in Latin America and the Caribbean (as well as other places, mostly located in the global South). In that context, the landscapes and our analysis of them are directly crossed by power relations, conflict, the creation of borders, contestation of hierarchies, etc. The current...

  • "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People": A Critical examination of American park-space (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Whitson. Maxwell Forton.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People". Teddy Roosevelt’s words speak to the legacy of park-land narratives as unrestricted spaces open to all. Beneath this public veneer are contested landscapes founded in social division and inequality. With the origins of the National Parks, we look at how such spaces...

  • Illicit Landscapes and Illegal Economies in 19th century Southern Belize (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Blackmore.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines how peripheral landscapes, along the coast and cayes of Southern Belize, shaped the region’s early colonial period (AD 1544-1840). Specifically, who were the people who settled southern Belize and how did the economies and industries that formed around them critically impact both Spanish and...

  • Indigeneity and Empowerment: The Politics of Ethnic Labeling in the Philippines (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Acabado. Marlon Martin.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 300+ years of Spanish, and later, American colonial administration in the Philippines provided the backdrop to regionalism and distinct ethnolinguistic boundaries that borders into prejudice. This is highlighted by the acrimonious relationship between upland and lowland Filipinos, where the idea of being...

  • Landscape Ontologies as Landscape Politics: Chacoan Interventions in Northwestern New Mexico (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kellam Throgmorton.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Indigenous perspectives and the ontological turn emphasize that Pueblo emergence was a process of relational engagement with particular places on the landscape. Following this relational perspective, no two places could be identical, nor could the resulting social assemblages that arose from them; emergence as a...

  • Lived Space of Displaced People: A Comparative Approach to Contested Spaces in Iron Age Northern Mesopotamia and Modern Europe (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Egbers.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology grapples with the materiality of past subjects’ perception and organization of space, as drawn from objects, landscapes, architecture, and pictorial or textual representations. Generally what emerges from these data is a dominant or normative conceptualization of space. However, space is not merely the...

  • "Once an Indian Village:" The Buffum Street Site, Dispossession, and Contested Municipal Landscapes in Buffalo, New York (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Witt.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Buffum Street Site in South Buffalo, New York, is the location of a multicomponent Seneca Village, with an historic component dating between AD 1780 and 1844. This village served as the focal point of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, and important cultural features such as a mission church, the first permanent...

  • Walking the Migrant Trail: Mobilizing Landscape to Contest Border Enforcement Policies and Negotiate the Boundaries of Social Belonging (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Magda Mankel.

    This is an abstract from the "Contested Landscapes: The Archaeology of Politics, Borders, and Movement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents an archaeological ethnography of the Migrant Trail and a very recent past associated with the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. Composed primarily of U.S. citizens, the Migrant Trail is a seven-day walk that protests U.S. immigration and border enforcement policies and commemorates...