Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas, livre ebook

Applying social theory and incorporating non-Western perspectives in the interpretation of bioarchaeological research

This volume demonstrates how researchers in bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology can work to better understand concepts of life and death in past societies of the Indigenous Americas. Through case studies that apply the “ontological turn” to human funerary and skeletal remains, contributors set aside Western views of reality, nature, and personhood to explore how people of various cultures understood existence and the human body.

Contributors examine mortuary records from Inuit groups in Labrador and Greenland, Hopewell culture in the Lower Illinois River Valley, and Weeden Island and Puebloan traditions in the United States Southeast and Southwest. They look at the Paquimé community in Mexico, iconography of the Maya civilization, the demographics of Inka populations, and an ancient village on the Amazon River in Brazil. With attention to the viewpoints of these cultures, these essays deconstruct the boundaries between human remains and other interred artifacts, the living and the dead, and other binaries rooted deeply in Western science.

Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas reminds readers that their own ontological perspectives affect how they interpret the past. By considering diverse, non-Western worldviews and engaging with novel social theories of the body, this volume inspires new understandings of precontact societies.

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1. Bodies of Evidence: An Introduction
María Cecilia Lozada and Gordon F. M. Rakita

Chapter 2. Necrontology: Housing the Dead in Precontact Labrador and Greenland
Peter Whitridge and Mari Kleist

Chapter 3. Ontology, Time Travel, and Transformation in the Lower Illinois Valley
Jason L. King, Jane E. Buikstra, and Robert B. Pickering

Chapter 4. Body Ontologies and Social Complexities in Precontact Florida
Neill Wallis and John Krigbaum

Chapter 5. Ontological Insecurity and Social Transformation: Ritualized Violence and Corporeality—Pueblo Case Study
J. Cristina Freiberger and Debra L. Martin

Chapter 6. Body Parts and Partible Bodies: Indications of Non-Western Ontologies at Paquimé, Chihuahua
Gordon F. M. Rakita, Adrianne Offenbecker, and Kyle Waller

Chapter 7. Eating Death: Maya Rationales for Mortality during the Classic Period
James L. Fitzsimmons

Chapter 8. Bodies, Bones, and the Dead: Representations and Cross-Category Connections in Classic Maya Iconography
Sarah E. Jackson

Chapter 9. Isotopes and the Body Politic: Residential Origins and Relocations in the Inka Imperial Heartland
Bethany L. Turner

Chapter 10. The Materiality of Bodies in the Mouth of the Amazon: Life and Death in the Indigenous Site of Curiaú Mirim I
Avelino Gambim Júnior

Epilogue
Pamela L. Geller

List of Contributors

Index