Material Bodies, Living Objects: Bodily Adornment and Death in the Algonquian Chesapeake

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the relationship between the human body and the objects that adorned them within the Late Woodland through early colonial (AD 900–1680) Algonquian Chesapeake. Drawing on theories that cite the human body as the battle ground upon which political authority is established, I seek to explore the ways in which adornment objects (extensions of the body) were deployed to expand, counteract, or contradict human agency. Historic Algonquian interactions with shell and copper, tangible metaphors for birth and social action, demonstrate that these materials exhibited humanlike qualities and, at times, animated relations with the insentient (the skeletal remains of dead relatives, for instance). At the same time, these shifting animacies were bound up in the transformation of people and their bodies into something more akin to objects, as slaves, war trophies, and skeletal remains that were commingled, burned, or buried. Having witnessed burial ceremonies, the chiefly (re)distribution of shell and copper ornamentation, and rituals aimed at suppressing dangerous nonhuman actors, seventeenth-century English colonials knew the significance of beads and beadwork in the Powhatan political sphere. Efforts then were aimed at controlling these objects and by proxy, the Algonquian bodies that they adorned.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33119