Towards a Nonlinear History of Lake Cocibolca, Nicaragua

Summary

Traditional narratives within Nicaraguan archaeology, based on primarily ethnohistoric rather than archaeological evidence, have privileged the arrival of external actors from Central Mexico at the expense of indigenous developments and have emphasized imposed change rather than situated continuity. Especially given that as archaeologists, our primary sources are material culture, we should approach mobility from a materialist engagement with the flows and hardenings of matter, sensu Manuel De Landa. This framework will allow for more nuanced interpretations of multidirectional movement, as well as an acknowledgement of the emergent properties that may have arisen from these interactions. Such a nonlinear approach will require a redefinition of the spatial logics of orientation posited by culture-areas, aided by employing the concept of landscape as defined by historical ecology. It will move towards a re-entanglement of humans and environments, which I argue are enmeshed and inseparable. My research centers around Lake Cocibolca, tracing flows of lacustrine resources between the multiple communities of practice situated around and within it and the sedimentation of these flows in the landscape. It is an explicit attempt to illustrate the vital role of multiple forms of localized movements, which have been overlooked in favor of unidirectional trans-isthmus migrations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21598