The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The first millennium CE witnessed incipient forms of monumental traces across landscapes of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, from parts of Honduras to Colombia. Still today, mounds and rock art remain the most visible traces of indigenous pasts. This symposium brings together recent research from various parts of this area and with different archaeological foci. The symposium is intended to capture a wider scope of the notion of monumentality, going beyond form and history to include studies that expand into discussions of durable traces, such as rock art, larger geomorphological features, and crossing over between material categories as, for example, stone, sediments, aquatic environments, and particular biotic spheres. The symposium asks if such features human-made or human-regarded are also monumental by positing that such durable traces define or make spaces. By doing so, the symposium intends to argue that the physical surroundings of Central America and Colombia were filled with natural features and physical forms that recalled time, as things from earlier, and structured human movement, as orienting way signs.