Remembering the “Forgotten Peninsula”

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While better known for his exceptional work on households and South American archaeology, Jerry Moore’s contribution to sparking a surge in the archaeology of the “Forgotten Peninsula” of Baja California should not go unmentioned. Most importantly, he brought a strong dose of anthropologically informed and oriented archaeology to the Peninsula, which has had the effect of raising the bar for scholars working on this environmentally, culturally, and historically exceptional, but under-researched region. I will here enumerate a few of the areas of ongoing research in Baja California that were impacted and benefited from Jerry Moore’s involvement there, ranging from the regional to personal in scale. Finally, an examination of changing household and community organization on Isla Cedros draws, in part, on some of the ideas that he has been kind enough to share with me over the last 20 years—namely, the ways in which the architecture of “small-scale” societies can provide a great deal of illumination about the nature of social interactions within a community. It is past time that we follow the path laid out for us by Dr. Moore and cast our view more widely and better encompass more of the anthropology that archaeology can accomplish.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Humble Houses to Magnificent Monuments: Papers in Honor of Jerry D. Moore

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36852.0