A Procession of Faces: Considering the Materiality of Relational Ontologies in Southern Florida

Summary

Recent materiality scholarship seeks to understand the entangled world of belief and practice. The experience of the world is both cognitive and material and scholars are beginning to embrace the idea that there is no separation between the two. Understanding the intertwined nature of the cognitive and material world is at the center for evaluating the nature of groups that embrace a relational view of the world. In this paper, we consider the essential role that material culture plays in the relational worldview of the peoples of southern Florida. In particular, we focus specifically on perishable material culture that either possesses animate properties or is animated by individuals through performance. Throughout our discussion, we explore how these particular aspects of material culture are shaped and shaped by the histories of the people who lived in the region. We use this discussion as a departure point to argue that the peoples of southern Florida likely had different ontological histories than those of the interior American Southeast, which were likely rooted in the aquatic landscapes they inhabited.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Dynamic Worlds, Shifting Paradigms: Relational Ontologies in Archaeology

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