From Las Brisas to the World: The Genesis of a Periphery-Core Perspective under the Tutelage of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman

Summary

This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the influences of Pat and Ed's methods and theories on two friends who first met and worked together in 1990 at the archaeological site of Las Brisas in the Naco Valley, Honduras. Without the incredible opportunities, methodological grounding, and theoretical approach provided by Pat and Ed, our careers could have languished under core-periphery ideologies and structures. While doing archaeological research in far flung places like Belize, Ecuador, Ireland, and the North American Southwest, we almost always found ourselves in places with labels like peripheral, provincial, hinterland, and boundary. Yet the people that lived in these places clearly had sociocultural and socioeconomic complexity, as well as worthy interactions with their neighbors. These realities are diminished by the core-periphery perspective and accompanying terms. Not to worry though, the formative grounding we received from Pat and Ed came to the rescue. They gave us the theoretical space, critical eye, and creativity to articulate different and better interpretations of past lifeways where causality and orientation are not unidirectional from a core.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25353