Travels and Traverses, Pilgrimages and Passages: Alternative Concepts of Interaction

Summary

When confronted by the presence of non-local ceramics and stone tools, variations in artifact styles, the spatial distribution of settlements and settlement hierarchies, and evidence thought to indicate intergroup conflict, archaeologists typically turn to the general concept of "interaction" to explain these material residues. Furthermore, interaction scenarios sometimes are premised on the notion of inequities in resource access. When cultural behemoths like Cahokia are implicated in scenarios of interaction in distant locales, the interactions often are described as unidirectional moments in time, in part as a byproduct of interpretive constraints placed on us by the coarse-grained chronologies that currently exist for much of the Eastern Woodlands. In this paper, I unpack these issues, particularly looking at the question of how interaction registers in the archaeological record, problems of equifinality in the interpretation of behavioral origins of material culture, and I advocate for models that consider interactions in multidirectional and serial terms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Investigating Interaction from Tunnacunnhee to Talaje: Papers in Honor of Richard W. Jefferies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17032