Place, Place Name and Property in the identification of O’odham and Pee Posh TCPs.

Summary

Ethnogeography considers the ways in which human beings invest places, spaces, or points on the land with names and information that render them culturally meaningful. Many places in a culture’s ethnogeography are also Traditional Cultural Properties or TCPs. TCPs are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and by definition are significant to the perpetuation of traditional worldview and living indigenous cultures. This presentation reports on recent advances in O’odham and Pee Posh TCP investigation and documentation. O’odham and Pee Posh ethnogeography and place names are examined in relation to archaeological data and site location in order to underscore the importance of indigenous systems of geographic knowledge for recognizing TCPs. It also explores the inherent difficulties encountered in the translation of traditional, multi-dimensional concepts of place into western concepts of property based largely on two-dimensional locational systems for mapping and visualization.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Tribal Heritage Management Programs in Action at the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage