Archaeological Actor-Network Theory: Case Study at Cerro Maya (Cerros, Belize)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This study uses a modified actor-network approach to examine and characterize the human and nonhuman relationships that produced and shaped ancient Maya caches and the corresponding ritual events wherein they were buried. This contrasts with archaeological approaches that have generally focused on defining essential properties of artifacts to define or clarify typologies or to determine their symbolic meaning. These approaches have determined that caches marked the beginning of structure use (or final construction phases), were related to Maya cosmological beliefs of sacred space, and likely served ideological functions during ritual. Although extremely important insights, these traditional approaches have obscured the fact that, among the Maya, caches were experienced as a durational process of social life and were always contextualized and affected by social relationships, human-object relationship and interaction with the landscape. In this study Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory (or ANT) is used to infer, model, and characterize the relationships between materials, objects, places, groups of people, intentions and actions. Latour’s extremely flexible actor-network approach allows the researchers to map relationships as durational networks that contain social relationships, and human-object relationships all within the context of the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23974