Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Persistent place is a term used by archaeologists to describe places that are used, occupied, or revisited by humans over a long period of time. Most studies see places as persistent due to the type, availability, and abundance of resources or because humans attribute these places meaning and importance. In this symposium, we question such approaches and instead concentrate on the relational and experiential qualities of persistent places and how relationships make such places meaningful, animate, affective, and ultimately attractive or beneficial over a long period of time. We especially encourage participants to consider relationships between nonhuman entities, phenomena, materials, objects, natural features, and entire landscapes in creating persistent places as well as the dynamic qualities and atmospheres that these relationships generate. Overall, the goal is to move beyond behavioral and anthropocentric perspectives to consider why persistent places draw, change, and ultimately shape humans and explore the ways in which such places are active participants in the creation of history and culture.

Other Keywords
Landscape Archaeology • Historic • Ancestral Pueblo • Ideology • ontology • Iconography and epigraphy • Ethnohistory/History • Ritual and Symbolism • and Memory • Historical Archaeology

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United States of America (Country) • USA (Country) • Kansas (State / Territory) • New Mexico (State / Territory) • Oklahoma (State / Territory) • Arizona (State / Territory) • Texas (State / Territory) • Sonora (State / Territory) • Chihuahua (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  • Building on Basso: Ndee Place-Making as Cultural Persistence and Survivance (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Vidrine. Nicholas Laluk.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ndee Place-based understandings of the past, present, and future are ageless and enduring. In his book Wisdom sits in Places (1996) Keith Basso explains the moral and social underpinnings of Ndee ties to place through topography and storytelling. However, in reference to present and future intersections with Ndee...

  • Climate Adaptations in Persistent Places: Relational Solutions in Yucatán, Mexico (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maia Dedrick. Patricia McAnany. Adolfo Batún Alpuche.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper focuses on the past 500 years of nearly continual human presence on the lands held today by residents of Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico. Previous work addressed why town residents continued to persist in this area despite the violence of colonialism. One answer pointed to significant human relationships with...

  • Fluid Persistence: The Heritage Matters and Watery Wellness of the Bath Spring and Stream, Nevis (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Neal Ferris.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The volcanic waters of the Bath Spring on Nevis flow downstream and enter Gallows Bay in the Caribbean Sea, a fluid persistence that has shaped and been shaped by the differently lived archaeologies along its waterscape before and through local becomings of western colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. Their...

  • Graffiti Atmospheres and the Durability of Transient Places (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Whitridge.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although simple tags are liable to appear anywhere, contemporary graffiti thrives in places that are marginal to everyday traffic, such as alleyways, rooftops, overpasses and vacant or abandoned structures. Even in these places graffiti is usually impermanent; other writers will eventually go over it or the wall will...

  • Intervening Impersistence on the St. Johns River, Florida (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Asa Randall.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shell mounds of the St. Johns River basin in northeast Florida are among some of the longest-lived places in North America. The repeated occupation over 9,000 years in duration attests to the attention paid to these places through depositions and encounters. Depositional histories reveal how places grounded...

  • Landscapes, Memory, and the Pueblo World (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patrick Cruz.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Landscapes are entangled with social meaning. Societies that live upon a landscape imbue it with both cultural meaning and use them as mnemonic devices in order to preserve their histories. In turn, these culturally constructed meanings and mnemonics act in a feedback loop as both formulation and preservation of...

  • The Persistence of Presence in the Rock Art Traditions of the Great Lakes (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Watts.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While recent scholarship has fruitfully considered the importance of Indigenous ontological commitments (e.g., to power and place) in the creation of rock art, notions of presence as a discrete component of an image’s being remain underexplored. In this contribution, I seek to examine these notions as distinct from...

  • Persistent Places, Affordances, and Temporalities on Chacoan Time Bridge Roads (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning in the 1980s, researchers noticed that some monumental avenues in the Chaco World (ca. AD 800-1200) of the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest were “roads through time” linking non-contemporaneous sites. These so-called “time bridges” are often interpreted as monuments built by later generations to...

  • Pilgrimage Centers as Persistent Places: Spiritual Magnetism, Affects, and Atmospheres (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Skousen.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pilgrimage centers and shrines are persistent places due in large part to spiritual magnetism, defined as the power of a place of pilgrimage to attract devotees. Most scholars, following James Prestons’ original treatment of the term, believe spiritual magnetism comes from and is conferred by humans based on cultural,...

  • Places that Percolate: French Post Park and the Creation of a Hoosier Origin Story (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Moore.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. On the surface, French Post Park, a small, wooded picnic area and campground located on the south bank of the Wabash River in Carroll County, Indiana, may seem unremarkable. Covering about 5.4 acres, the park’s amenities consist of a small shelter, a few fire rings, a boat ramp, and a swing set. But, to the people of...

  • Reconsidering the Role of Archaeology in Shaping “Affective Places”: Case Scenarios from Hawai'i and Yucatán (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Christie.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Western-trained scholars like to take for granted that the discipline of archaeology plays a foundational role in providing data from ancient sites from which scientists reconstruct histories, social organization, and what drew people to such places. Government institutions use such information to assign values to...

  • Sticky Places: Persistence and Relationality (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlyn Antoniuk.

    This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Persistent Places: Relationships, Atmospheres, and Affects" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The goal of this session is to explore the factors underlying persistent places, specifically thinking beyond resource availability or representationalist notions of meaning bestowed by humans. In this paper, I outline the theoretical ideas and concepts that underlie this symposium. I argue that all places exist as...