The Disintegration of Style and Memory: Mound 3 Assemblages at Lake Jackson

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

At the 75th annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeology, Claudine Payne proposed that Lake Jackson’s Mound 3 served as a repository for ritual heirlooms that could no longer be used in the manners their creators intended. This paper revives her hypothesis to examine the role of this archaeological context at the geographic and temporal periphery of the Braden Style horizon. As this symposium’s participants agree that artworks in this style transform objects used for ritual into political resources, I entertain the notion that a loss of essential ancestral knowledge for their use is accompanied by risks associated with their misuse. Consequently, Mound 3’s construction could be interpreted as a preventative measure that secured these potent heirlooms with the deceased individuals whose voices could no longer be heard by the living. From the author’s perspective, Lake Jackson thus provides an important bookend in discussions about the communicative qualities of Native North American iconography.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Art Style as a Communicative Tool in Archaeological Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 30924