Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory
Exploring Ontologies of the Precontact Americas: From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory
professor of anthropology and associate vice president for faculty excellence and academic engagement
research associate in anthropology
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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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Front Matter
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1
Bodies of Evidence: An Introduction
María Cecilia Lozada andGordon F. M. Rakita
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2
Necrontology: Housing the Dead in Precontact Labrador and Greenland
Peter Whitridge andMari Kleist
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3
Ontology, Time Travel, and Transformation in the Lower Illinois Valley
Jason L. King and others
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4
Body Ontologies and Social Complexities in Precontact Florida
Neill Wallis andJohn Krigbaum
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5
Ontological Insecurity and Social Transformation: Ritualized Violence and Corporeality—Pueblo Case Study
J. Cristina Freiberger andDebra L. Martin
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6
Body Parts and Partible Bodies: Indications of Non-Western Ontologies at Paquimé, Chihuahua
Gordon F. M. Rakita and others
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7
Eating Death: Maya Rationales for Mortality during the Classic Period
James L. Fitzsimmons
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8
Bodies, Bones, and the Dead: Representations and Cross-Category Connections in Classic Maya Iconography
Sarah E. Jackson
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9
Isotopes and the Body Politic: Residential Origins and Relocations in the Inka Imperial Heartland
Bethany L. Turner
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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
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Epilogue
Pamela L. Geller
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End Matter
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