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Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory

Online ISBN:
9781683404248
Print ISBN:
9781683404071
Publisher:
University Press of Florida
Book

Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory

Gordon F. M. Rakita (ed.),
Gordon F. M. Rakita
(ed.)

professor of anthropology and associate vice president for faculty excellence and academic engagement

University of North Florida
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María Cecilia Lozada (ed.)
María Cecilia Lozada
(ed.)

research associate in anthropology

University of Chicago
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
28 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9781683404248
Print ISBN:
9781683404071
Publisher:
University Press of Florida

Abstract

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 ontologies and engaging with novel social theories of the body, this volume inspires new understandings of precontact societies.

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