Anticipating Ruptures: Living with Uncertainty and Undertaking Repair

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Drawing on archaeological research on the longue durée of ancestral Lenca society in Honduras, we argue that centuries of resilience provided the tools people needed to understand and respond to periodic interruptions in the normal progress of seasons, lives, and relationships, “failures” of specific forms of social relations most dramatically visible as societal collapse and conquest. We relate this history to Indigenous ontologies in which relations between humans and other forces are in need of constant maintenance—repair—a philosophy that imagines and expects disruption, breaks, and even violence. We log evidence that communities in the ancestral Lenca area dealt with repeated uncontrollable events—extreme flooding, unpredictable impacts of volcanic ash eruptions, and agricultural failures—that provided them with a pragmatic and ritualized set of tools for confronting disasters. We examine changes in ritual action that suggest shifts in underlying philosophies of engagement with the landscape, in particular with the celestial realm, that emerge during the “collapse” of hierarchical social life beginning ca. AD 900–1100, and adjustments made in the face of the most visible catastrophe in Lenca history, the sixteenth-century colonization of the region, arguing that persistence in place resulted from overcoming failures in existing social routines by “repair.”

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Failure   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37998.0