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

Gordon F. M. Rakita (editor) & MarÝa Cecilia Lozada (editor)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1683404076 ISBN 13: 9781683404071

Publisher: University Press of Florida, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Gordon F. M. Rakita, professor of anthropology and associate vice president for faculty excellence and academic engagement at the University of North Florida, is coeditor of Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium.

María Cecilia Lozada, research associate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, is coeditor of Andean Ontologies: New Archaeological Perspectives.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1683404076
• ISBN 13: 9781683404071
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 340