Dr. Stacie King

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Associate Faculty for the Center for
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Indiana University Bloomington

Abstract:

This talk explores the challenges that ethnonyms create when trying to reconstruct
histories of multiethnic landscapes in the ancient world. My larger project in the Nejapa
region of Oaxaca, Mexico addresses various aspects of conquest and colonialism along
interegional trade routes, including identifying fortresses in mountain landscapes, the
meaning of unoccupied land, the relationships entailed by trade and exchange, and
reconciling archival documents, oral history, and archaeology. In this talk, I use my work
to demonstrate how ethnonyms have pervaded interpretations of the past, archaeological
reconstructions, and Colonial period registers, such that it remains difficult to envision a
different kind of thriving, multiethnic world. Taken together, archaeological data, archival
information, and oral history from rural multiethnic Nejapa, Oaxaca show us that
different indigenous communities across this landscape experienced Aztec, Zapotec, and
Spanish conquests and colonialisms differently between the years A.D. 1350 and 1650, and
that these differences do not fit well with traditional reconstructions of Nejapa’s
indigenous ethnic groups (Mixe, Chontal, and Zapotec). Instead, the data complicate
entrenched notions of ethnicity and challenge their basic formulation. The long-standing
multiethnic past of ancient Nejapa set the stage for a different form of indigeneity that
Nejapa’s resident experience in the present.

The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico house some of the most spectacularly complex rock art of the ancient world. Approximately 4000 years ago, hunter-gatherers began transforming this region into a painted landscape. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate Pecos River style painting that spans twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research, as well as insight from ethnohistory and art history, Carolyn Boyd identifies patterns in the art that relate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples, including the Aztec and the contemporary Huichol. Analysis of these patterns led to the identification of the White Shaman mural as an ancient visual narrative relating a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time.

Savino di Lernia

Director, The Archaeological Mission in the Sahara

Director, The Archaeological Mission in the Kenyan Rift Valley

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Abstract

Climate changes are a serious threat to cultural and natural heritage. Although many contexts are today seriously endangered, recent studies highlight how “archaeology and cultural heritage threatened by anthropogenic climate change are not just victims but part of the solution” (Hambrecht & Rockman, 2017. American Antiquity). Long-term archaeological projects could provide evidence to better understand the nature of the relations between climatically driven environmental changes and social trajectories. Aim of this talk is to present a synthesis of the main Holocene climate and environmental variations from a privileged geographical context – the central Sahara, where the magnitude of these changes was huge –, with a special focus on the Tadrart Acacus and Messak region (SW Libya). Here, cultural and social trajectories go together with resilient mechanisms of adaptations. Archaeological evidence reveals that social strategies were pivotal in coping with environmental changes. Although it is certainly true that climate changes are in fact central elements in cultural trajectories, in the past as today, this is even truer for marginal ecosystems such as the changing landscapes of the Holocene central Sahara. However, the continuity of many cultural practices until historical times and even later shows how the Saharan tradition is indeed an extraordinary way of life that deserves specific attention.

Early globalization? Isotopic evidence of food practices in Prehistoric Italy

Mary Anne Tafuri

Department of Environmental Biology, Sapienza University of Rome

The cultural and social importance of food goes far beyond the mere necessity of nutrition, yet archaeologists have been slow to tackle issues of the sociality of food in prehistory. This is a great loss particularly as the economic transformations, which structured human diet took place in prehistory. One reason for lack of attention to this question has been limited methodologies for investigating not only what foods were produced but also exactly what foods people consumed.

The increasing application of biomolecular investigations of skeletal tissues offers an exceptionally valuable approach for directly assessing aspects of an individual’s life, including their diet, geographical origin as well as the climate they inhabited.

In the Central Mediterranean a number of important economic questions can be addressed through isotopic investigations: we can explore the balance between plant and animal sources of food in the diet of prehistoric people and how this change between the onset of the Neolithic (ca. 6000 BC) and the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 900 BC). We can assess the relative contribution of marine resources to diet the Central Mediterranean and, further, we can identify mode and tempo for the use of new foods.

This talk will present new isotopic data on a large set of sites from prehistoric Italy that span from the earliest phases of the Neolithic to the later Bronze Age. A pattern of great complexity emerges, showing profound differences between the northern and southern regions of the Peninsula, which can be associated with environmental aspects but mostly should be interpreted as different cultural practices across space and time.