Negotiating social identity through practices with stone
Author(s): Pip Rath
Year: 2015
Summary
Dazzling, large, highly retouched obsidian objects comprised part of the material world of prehistoric people from West New Britain, Papua New Guinea from sometime between ca 6300- to 3300 years ago BP. Beyond their role as valuables, the seemingly mundane practices of choosing and acquiring raw material together with the application of a sequence of actions on the material and knowledge used in making them were fundamental for creating and structuring social relations. A case study, identifying and comparing the routine practices at three sites where various mixes of obsidian sources were exploited to make the stemmed tools, illustrates how people used these practices to negotiate social identity and ownership of the sources.
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Cite this Record
Negotiating social identity through practices with stone. Pip Rath. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 394984)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Practices
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Social Identity
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Stone Tools
Geographic Keywords
Oceania
Spatial Coverage
min long: 111.973; min lat: -52.052 ; max long: -87.715; max lat: 53.331 ;