Decolonizing Deposition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists view deposition as existing at an interesting crossroads: it is both fundamental to our basic understandings of site formation and easy to dismiss as unintentional or of secondary importance. Detailed discussions occur most frequently either to explain away issues with the archaeological record—poor preservation, looting, etc.—or to highlight highly structured and deliberate occurrences—burials, layering of colored sediment, etc. While these discussions are clearly important, a large amount of social understanding is overlooked when everything between the extremes is chalked up to casual activities, unremarkable accumulations, or “trash.” In particular, the extension of ontological categories, such as trash, can obscure the identification of important cultural patterns when applied to non-Western contexts, such as Indigenous North America. In this paper, we discuss the ways significant depositional practices have been overlooked by archaeological classifications of fill through a case study of ancestral Sugpiaq sites on the Kodiak archipelago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40250.0