Contemporary archaeology of Haitian vodou caching

Summary

Kneeling on bare earth, the Priestess takes a handful of store-bought confections from their

glinting metallic bag and tosses them into a living cache. Candles and carved stones protrude at

the sides of this hole, marking intrusions made and remade so many times they have now been

lost to memory (even as their matter persists). Following Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’ call to

study contemporary material culture archaeologically, this paper uses and presents ethnographic data

collected from observing a series of contemporary Hatian Vodou caching rituals over 4 years. It presents an

event-based analysis which considers the creation and maintenance of caching practices as

expressive and material networks which are a co-mingling of past, present, and future

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage