The Phantom Lake: Spectral Archaeology in the Tulare Basin

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the 1990s, spectral thematics have grown increasingly present in the humanities, stressing the persistence of memory, traces, and absences in the cultural sphere. Anthropologists likewise have contributed to this moment, as with Justin Armstrong’s spectral ethnography and Theo Kindynis’s' graffiti archaeology. This emerging methodology is promising when translated to the study of the Tulare Basin, defined by the eponymous “phantom lake,” artificially drained by intensive industrial agriculture. Ethnographically, Yokuts ceremony reaffirms the lake both as one who speaks, a subject, and as a tripni, or spiritually potent space; and agricultural communities continue to utilize water-witching on the dry lakebed well into the twenty-first century. In combination with traditional historical-archaeological methods, such as map regression and pedestrian survey, an archaeology of desiccation is constructed. As a precursory exploration, the wider “hauntological” methodology is critically engaged. A hesitancy to engage with the ghost-as-ghost is identified. I contend that the specter is a real social phenomena and must be dealt with as such.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35570.0