How to talk to materials? Dialogue between researcher, analytical chemistry and drug paraphernalia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Intoxicant consumption is a practice that was reported by the European colonizers when they first arrived in the Caribbean, however, their reports were often vague and lacking detail, leaving material evidence as the only tangible evidence of this consumption. But what if the material evidence we have does not align with the colonizers' descriptions? How can we challenge these historical descriptions to talk with the material evidence, allowing it to help us understand more about its use and meaning? These materials have many potential roles and uses. How can we decipher the multiple uses and meanings of these materials? How can we use analytical chemistry as a way to find more languages to speak to materials, rather than using it to limit our ways of understanding them. In this paper I would like to show some experiments on how we could talk to materials and highlight the risks of viewing analytical chemistry, as the sole objective method for determining the possible uses and contents of archaeological materials. For instance, in the study of intoxicants, the detection of a specific compound does not directly link the material to a particular use or content.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52781