Archaeologies-Journal of the World Archaeological Congress最新文献

During the first half of the 20th century, the lumber industry played an instrumental role in the economic development of the Témiscouata valley in eastern Québec, Canada. Considering the strong working-class lumber heritage in Témiscouata, a public archaeology approach was used as a tool to engage community in the documentation of their own history. Based on the results of a public archaeology programme led at a 1940s lumber camp site, this study explores how the archaeological experience acts as a “memory trigger” leading individuals to share personal stories and local knowledge. Ultimately, this research illustrates the importance of public archaeology for accessing and shaping collective memory.

Few archaeological studies of Pre-Columbian Maya peoples mention enslaved individuals. While ethnohistoric texts attest to the likelihood of Indigenous Maya enslavement practices before the arrival of Spanish conquistadores and friars, archaeologists are reluctant to consider such practices and peoples into interpretative frameworks because of their tremendous ambiguity in the archaeological record. This paper embraces and probes the ambiguity of the archaeological record to interrogate the possibility of hidden histories of captive and enslaved Maya individuals in general and captive and enslaved Maya women in particular during the Classic and Postclassic periods. It argues that such women cannot be found in particular types of artifacts or hieroglyphic texts but at the intersection of names and landscapes.

While ethnoarchaeological studies on megalith-building traditions in a few communities in India’s northeastern region have enriched our knowledge, a knowledge gap remains regarding how traditional societies mobilized the workforce for transporting and erecting stone monuments. This paper aims to fill this research gap with an ethnographically documented case of building a monolith in 2020 in Willong Khullen, a village inhabited by the Maram Nagas (an indigenous Tibeto-Burman ethnic community) in the Indian state of Manipur. After participating in the undertaking, I argue that traditional networks of support among sub-clans and clans in the village, as well as among neighboring and distant villages, may have ensured the free mobilization of workforce. The survey also revealed that work feasts and a grand feast, where the host expends maximum resources, are crucial for accessing social support networks, including the mobilization of labor participants. These feasts serve as a means of reciprocating the labor participants for their voluntary labor and time. The survey results support the claim of the high cost of such undertakings and supplement that feasts may have served similar functions in the past among other Naga communities in the region.

This study reveals the early results of diverse community archaeology activities taking place in a contemporary archaeological site, a cardboard hospital built in 1912 in the Vall Fosca (Catalan Pyrenees). This isolated valley, formerly used to breed cattle, had three hydroelectric power facilities erected in the twentieth century. In 2019, the Torre Capdella Town Council and the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia initiated a project involving local communities. The main scope of this work is to comprehend the materiality of the working class and to provide new narratives about the people who built them and subsequently occupied part of the valley.

The UK’s housing crisis is at breaking point, caused primarily by deregulation, the diminished provision of public housing and the marketing of housing as property assets rather than homes. Yet the role of the heritage industry within these processes has been insufficiently analysed. This paper outlines multiple intersections between heritage and the housing crisis by examining the regeneration of one of London’s post-World War II public housing estates, the Aylesbury. It will illustrate how heritage methods and discourse have been instrumentalised by property developers and estate residents and discuss the implications this has for the heritage sector.

My paper addresses perspectives on powerful stones among rural farmers and pastoralists in the contemporary Andes. Stones are considered sites of transformation that transcend temporal dimensions. Some boulders are considered to have been people in previous ages; their petrification is an ongoing process that affects human beings in their vicinity, suggesting an ontological orientation in which time, place, materiality, and consciousness are intimately interrelated. Significant stones, ranging from miniature livestock to huge monoliths, are connected with powerful mountains through a play of fractal relations that animates the cosmos.

Boreda Indigenous knowledge prescribed that humans respect all entities with whom they co-inhabit, including stone. Humans, stone, and water’s reciprocal relationships prompted their participation in each other becoming fetuses, infants, children, youth, married adults, mature adults, elders, and ancestors. Life was a co-production between humans and non-humans, such that stone and water could inflict harm or bring well-being to humans. Non-human beings, such as flaked stone tools, were evidence of engaging in correct interaction ‘practice’ (time, place, and actor) with other beings—a process of mutual respect and responsibility and one in which there was no end or final “product.”