Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes

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.