When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality, and the Numic Ritual Life Cycle

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper explores the critical subject of indigenous oral traditions in California and the Great Basin. Using an interdisciplinary approach that considers Numic oral teachings relative to place-based data in ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and geology, the author interrogates traditional narratives encoding some of the earliest forms of scientific observation among Numic speaking communities. This research explores multigenerational memories of recorded localized geological knowledge within oral teachings. These teachings, expressed in the form of narratives, songs, rock art, and material culture, provide opportunities to explore memory, ritual, materiality, and potential convergences between science and indigenous ways of knowing.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Painting the Past: Interpretive Approaches in Global Rock Art Research

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40336.0