All Is Never Lost: Examining Coalescence, Cultural Resilience, and Survivance in the Archaeology of a Protohistoric Village on the Arkansas River

Summary

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

Archaeologists often approach the contact period in the Americas, and subsequent upheavals, with a sense of melancholy at a world supplanted in our own becoming. While contact and the ensuing centuries of colonization certainly brought trauma, significant loss, and destabilization to Indigenous cultures, the experiences of Native people of this period need not always be framed as a history of elimination and suffering. Instead, archaeologists working in these contexts are uniquely positioned to examine cultural resiliency and survivance through expressions of continuity and reimagining of tradition. Evidence from architecture, art, and technology produced at Carden Bottoms, a seventeenth-century village on the Arkansas River, demonstrates this. While communities undoubtedly suffered due to the impacts of contact, they also relied on long-standing practice and tradition, as well as innovation, to propel themselves into the future. Careful excavation of houses here reveals the coalescence of area cultures and their role as active agents in ensuring their own cultural resilience and survival in the face of unprecedented challenges, as well as the power and agency of material culture in navigating such turbulent times.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37063.0