Reconsidering Time, Matter, and Community in the Monumental Architecture of Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists are keenly aware that the past, present, and future are always being reworked, always in motion: a composite weave of multiple temporalities. One of the enduring challenges of our discipline is to tease out of the seemingly static archaeological record how people in the past conceptualized, materialized, and experienced time. In this paper, I analyze time as it manifested in the lives of people in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the Late Formative to the Late Classic periods (ca. 400 BCE–900 CE). I employ a New Materialist theoretical framework to pay particular attention to the way that objects, materials, and their properties did the work of enfolding time and assembling history in the region’s monumental architecture. This perspective offers a novel way to reconsider relational ontologies as assemblages of people, things, places, and ideas that not only exist in time but also make time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37283.0