Toward a Miwok Archeology of Yosemite California

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

While there is a long history of archeological work in Yosemite National Park, this work is grounded in Western European traditions of archeology that does not take into consideration perspectives of the people who produced much of the record this archeology sets out to understand. These people had their own sense of time, space, and values that effected how they inhabited Yosemite which in turn effected the materials they left behind. Because human’s construct the worlds we live in through culture, the authors of this poster suggest that it is impossible to understand the archeology of Yosemite using Western European constructs of time, space, and values. We feel that it is way overdue for a completely different approach to the archeology of Yosemite, an archeology grounded in a Miwuk world view. While this poster takes a Miwuk perspective, it does not want to imply that Yosemite belonged to the Miwuk. It was shared space, seen as sacred to a number of Native American peoples. This poster is a logical extension of earlier work by authors that laid out the broad-brush strokes of Miwuk Archeology. This poster attempts to apply this archeology to the specific location of Yosemite.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38678.0