Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Ballester.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The construction of the social landscape of the Atacama Desert coast (northern Chile) was a long and dynamic process in pre-Columbian times, involving different agencies and material strategies. Around 6500 calBP, these fisher-hunter-gatherers started building permanent settlements composed of clustered semi-subterranean...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordi Rivera Prince.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeological studies often focus on who is present in a context, how they got there, and why this might be. Votive contexts are unique because of the circumstances leading to their deposition—however, more attention is placed on the processes that resulted in these deposits, versus the places where this happened (Bradley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pamela Stone.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many of us, the final the resting place of our ancestors can anchor us to the landscapes of our families’ histories and to our community. For victims of settler colonialism and creeping genocide, whose homelands were stolen and burial places desecrated or erased, the recovery of their ancestors can offer validation and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Peters.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Paracas site, on the bay and peninsula of that name, has deep history as a fishing center where ritual linked the Paracas ceramic tradition to the Early Horizon. On Cerro Colorado, Tello and colleagues excavated womb-like, crowded shaft tombs of the Paracas Cavernas mortuary tradition (450 – 250 BCE). On the steep slope of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexis Boutin.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Sonoma Developmental Center served thousands of residents who would today be described as disabled, mentally ill, or deviating from social norms. Many of the ~2000 residents buried in its cemetery from 1892-1960 were placed in the SDC as children. Their gravemarkers featured only their initials and registration number, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, scholars have recognized ties between the Central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan and the Maya city of Tikal, particularly in the wake of a poorly understood event in AD 378. At Tikal, the strongest evidence for that connection comes from the southern edge of the site center, within a precinct centered around an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Raillard Arias.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the cusp between Andes and Amazon, limestone cliffs cloaked in the mist of tropical montane cloud forest house the remains of Chachapoya ancestors. Given their dramatic placement within a fractured and lush environment, the “chullpa” or above-ground mortuary structures of pre-colonial Chachapoya communities have long evoked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andreana Cunningham.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human remains occupy a contested status both in bioarchaeology and culturally, wherein the same set of remains can be conceived of as a complex former person or as a disembodied object without depth. This paper explores the contested status of these remains in diasporic contexts by outlining a theoretical model called the “Black...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Sutter.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Political landscapes are often the focus of polity-sponsored feasts and performative rituals that reinforce power and subjugation. For the Pyramids at Moche (AD 400 – 850) on the north coast of Perú, previously reported bodies interred within the Huaca de la Luna were those of elite, nonlocal male warriors. In accordance with the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Bongers.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What does the development of ritualized behaviors say about how Indigenous peoples endured political turmoil? This study examines how local communities in the Chincha Valley of southern Peru confronted European colonialism through mortuary practice. After dominating the Chincha Valley of southern Peru in the Late Intermediate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bradymir Bravo.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En Huarochirí y Yauyos, cada vez menos, los “muertos” guardados en sus tumbas desde tiempos prehispánicos, construyen un paisaje vivo que interactúa con las comunidades locales (con respeto, miedo y devoción) a través de narrativas orales, ritos y ceremonias festivas heredadas de tiempos remotos. Esto contrasta bruscamente con la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Estella Weiss-Krejci.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Every dead person has the potential to be claimed or disputed by someone long after their death. Drawing on the definition of ‘affect’ by Crellin and Harris (2021), Weiss-Krejci et al. (2022) refer to these dead as 'reemergent'. Whether a 'reemergence' of the dead takes place depends to a large extent on their affective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katharine Kolpan.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agency of the dead, particularly the dead body, has been hotly debated in biological anthropology and archaeology. Can the dead influence the living? Or are dead bodies purely at the mercy of the cosmological and pollical whims of the extant world? This presentation examines multiple aspects of the emplaced dead body to argue...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Debra Martin.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Context and history are crucial to examine when interpreting both local and broader implications and effects of mass killings and massacres. Massacre scholars have shown that political-economic and cultural events shape the ideas of the perpetrators who become convinced that a massacre is the only option to solve a perceived...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maegan Jankowski.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intersections between identity, politics, and the dead provide windows into otherwise unobservable dimensions of ancient societies. In the multiethnic Middle Sicán culture (Peru; 900-1050 CE), Sicán lords buried their dead around six monumental huacas at the Sicán capital (La Leche valley). These huacas were symbols of political...