Late Archaic Body Worlds: Some Preliminary Thoughts

Summary

The Terminal Archaic (ca. 4000-3000 cal. BP) marked an important turning point in the upper Midwest. New relationships among persons, landscapes, and material culture emerged that, in many ways, set a pattern for the next two millennia. This paper makes a preliminary effort to interpret these changes in terms of shifting ontologies of the body. Of particular interest is the emergence of clear spatial divisions between the living and the dead on the landscape. Other patterns include the elaborate development of the body as a site of (often) gendered display, and structured deposits which fall into the categories of nets (unique collections of functionally diverse, exotic, and esoteric objects) and sets (caches of self-similar objects, usually biface cache blades. These developments will be considered from a broadly relational standpoint in an effort to trace the connections among materials, landscapes, and bodies that were articulated in Terminal Archaic depositional practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Mediating Spirit Worlds in Native North America

Keywords

Spatial Coverage