The Signs of the Dead: Theorizing Ancestrality via Semiotics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this presentation I explore the ways in which African perspectives on ancestrality can inform archaeological approaches to the past. In historic Madagascar, the works and inheritance of the ancestors were fundamental to the building of political sovereignty, just as they are fundamental to the practice of archaeology and history making. Highland Malagasy recognized that the dead continued to act in the present, their agency made visible through different signs or traces. I explore how this insight directs us to a relational and semiotic approach both toward the presence of the dead and how we perceive their traces archaeologically.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36429.0