The Archaeology of Failure

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 "The Archaeology of Failure" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Failure is a fundamental part of the human condition yet remains undertheorized in archaeology. Failure is admittedly definitionally tricky and can operate at multiple scales, from the catastrophic downfalls of ancient societies to everyday blunders and mishaps. Yet the challenges make it all the more interesting. In this session, we bring together papers and researchers working on material from various periods in the New and Old Worlds, mixing case studies and theory. We examine what it means to fail, what failure looks like in the archaeological record, and what happens when we fail to fully appreciate failure.

Other Keywords
Ethnohistory/History • Historical Archaeology • Theory • Historic • Neolithic • Bronze Age • Iconography and epigraphy • Andes: Late Intermediate • Social and Political Organization • Intermediate Area

Geographic Keywords
Republic of Panama (Country) • Republic of Colombia (Country) • Netherlands Antilles (Country) • Aruba (Country) • Republic of Ecuador (Country) • South America (Continent) • Republic of Peru (Country) • Republic of Chile (Country) • South America: Andes • Department of Martinique (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)

  • Documents (6)
Documents
  • Anticipating Ruptures: Living with Uncertainty and Undertaking Repair (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rus Sheptak. Rosemary Joyce.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawing on archaeological research on the longue durée of ancestral Lenca society in Honduras, we argue that centuries of resilience provided the tools people needed to understand and respond to periodic interruptions in the normal progress of seasons, lives, and relationships, “failures” of specific forms of social relations most dramatically visible as...

  • Domesticating Earth: Rethinking the Origins of Agriculture (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Spengler.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origins of agriculture have long been depicted as one of the greatest innovations of humanity, a humanist approach that rose to prominence in archaeology during the latter half of the twentieth century. During this time, a wide range of push and pull models for the origins of agriculture were developed, all of which were formulated as responses to the...

  • A Failure of Imagination: North Coast Peruvian Irrigation under Spanish Colonial Rule (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ari Caramanica.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric documents describe the north coast as a verdant, irrigated landscape at the time of Spanish conquest; yet, only a few decades later, colonial archives are filled with legal disputes over water rights, water shortages, and the desertification of farmland. Cataclysmic demographic collapse caused by the introduction of European diseases accounts for...

  • An Introduction to Failure in the Archaeological Record (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Yitzchak Jaffe.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological theory has engaged little with failures, at least at certain scales. In this introduction, we attempt to lay out issues with the anthropological definition of failure while also drawing attention to issues of scale. While archaeologists readily identify “Big F” failures, such as social collapse and site abandonment, they less frequently consider...

  • Isolation, Innovation, and Fraud: Assessing Failure in Historical Mining and Metallurgy (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Van Buren.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mining and metallurgy are high-risk endeavors, and failure is common. In the first, the extent and nature of ore deposits are unknown, and the second is prone to mishaps due to inadequate temperature control, poor quality ore, and refractory malfunction, among other factors. Thus, failures in this industry—as measured by output—can be easily attributed to...

  • Praxis Makes Perfect? The Archaeological Correlates of Social Failure in Minoan Crete (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Cunningham.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a 2017 paper on architectural failures in Minoan Crete I suggested that these reflected a greater focus on signification than on engineering. Still failures, as drains that need refitting and paving that needs replacing cannot be seen otherwise; but a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the underlying purpose of these projects provides insight into...