Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes
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 "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
Due to their unique ecology, topography, and geological complexity, mountain landscapes are ideal places where archaeologists can examine the relationship between social action and the environment. Papers in this session address three key issues and set a new agenda for mountain bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology from a global perspective. First, mountain landscapes have been approached from a wide variety of theoretical frameworks. What are the most promising existing approaches and future developments in theorizing a bioarchaeology of mountain landscapes? Mountains can be arenas in which people contest and assert claims to territory, resources, and power. Visibility and accessibility within such landscapes impact communication, interaction, and engagement with other features of local social topographies, such as settlements, activity areas, and pathways. Second, what are the methodological opportunities and challenges for a bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology of mountain landscapes? How might new methods elucidate the lives and funerary practices of people buried in mountain landscapes? Third and finally, how do mountain communities compare with contemporaneous groups in the lowlands? To understand mountain adaptations, lifeways, and ideologies, mountain communities must be situated within a larger macroregion to see to what extent their landscape uniquely structured the social lives of upland communities.
Other Keywords
Bioarchaeology/Skeletal Analysis •
Mortuary Analysis •
Mortuary archaeology •
Landscape Archaeology •
Bronze Age •
Identity/Ethnicity •
Oaxaca •
bioarchaeology •
Migration •
Health
Geographic Keywords
Asia (Continent) •
Republic of Peru (Country) •
Russian Federation (Country) •
Republic of Panama (Country) •
Republic of Colombia (Country) •
Netherlands Antilles (Country) •
Aruba (Country) •
Republic of Ecuador (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
Republic of Chile (Country)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)
- Documents (9)
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Amber Runs through It: The Centralization of Wealth and Power in Late Prehistoric Lika, Croatia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric cultural and sociopolitical development in the mountainous region of Lika, Croatia is still poorly understood despite over a century of archaeological excavations. Traditional cultural-historical narratives based on grave good typologies suggest that a unified regional culture, the Iapodians, emerged at the end of the...
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Believers in the Highlands: Burying the Muslim Dead at the Qarakhanid Site of Tashbulak (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islam spread into Central Asia via the Arab invasions of the 7th century CE. According to current historical narratives, Islam’s first footholds were lowland urban centers, with Islam only slowly infiltrating the highlands. New research, presented here, challenges the idea that highland areas were a barrier to Islam. This paper...
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A Bioarchaeological Approach to Contested Mountain Landscapes in Transylvania’s Golden Quadrangle (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we introduce the agenda for the session Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes. Mountains and high altitude areas are ideal spaces where archaeologists can examine the relationship between social action and the environment. As this session will show, the study of human remains must be situated with a...
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A Bioarchaeological Approach to the Social Construction of Community Identities in Mountain Landscapes (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Huarochirí Manuscript has made legendary the social relationships of pre-Columbian groups inhabiting the Andean mountain landscape that ascends steeply from the present-day coastal capital city of Lima, Peru, to the high-altitude Huarochirí Province. In this famous collection of ethnohistoric narratives, authored in the indigenous...
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Dimensions of Health in the Andes: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Morbidity Patterns in Mountain Landscapes (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper uses a bioarchaeological approach to examine the morbidity profiles of highland communities in the Cusco region of Peru during the centuries that witnessed the rise, fluorescence, and demise of the Inka Empire (ca. 1300-1550 CE). Through original analysis of human skeletons from the sites of Huanacauri and Matagua and a...
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Farmers and Late Holocene Climate Change on the Edge of the Qinghai Plateau (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late Holocene, a cooling and drying climate, greater intergroup contact, and increasing sociopolitical complexity prevailed across Eurasia. On the eastern edge of the Qinghai Plateau, at the edge of the East Asian summer monsoon zone, millet farming societies faced local, cyclical changes to moisture and vegetation between 3000...
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Moving on up: The Promise of Multiple Data Sources in Reconstructing Early Population History of High Altitude Sites in Nepal (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the high elevation regions of Upper Mustang, Nepal, offer insights into population history in this region through multiple data sources including material culture, genomic, isotopic, and bioarchaeological data. Together, these data have enabled us to address questions of migration, patterns of exchange,...
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Ridges, Valleys, Mountains, and Plateaus: The Topographic Context of Late Mississippian Diversity in East Tennessee (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Topographical constraints played a role in shaping the social trajectory of the Southern Appalachian region. The Ridge and Valley physiographic province of East Tennessee includes the Tennessee River and is characterized by linear ridges and parallel valleys, with the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Appalachian Plateau...
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Zapotec Funerary Tradition: A Perspective Between Bioarchaeology and Landscape Archaeology (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The state of Oaxaca, southern Mexico has a very diverse topography, from highlands to floodplains, where mortuary and funerary patterns have been practiced by the prehispanic indigenous Zapotec for at least 3000 years. From simple graves to very complex and elaborate tombs, the Zapotecs used and reused their mortuary space within the...