Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Archaeology Division

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Immigration/Migration/Citizenship

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(3-1260) Things Carried: Movement and Resilience, Identity and Ethnicity through Diaspora in the Americas

Archaeological research has long investigated the initiation of sedentism and the processes of urbanization as markers of global human development, including causes, consequences, and social dynamics of ‘settling down’. With this focus on sedentary lifestyles, however, comes a tendency to overlook the continued physical movements of people and the attendant social transformations that arise from those movements. In the Americas specifically, cartographic documentation of Indigenous populations at the time of contact, early anthropological notions of “culture areas”, and academic rejection of diffusionary theories in archaeology combined to create a somewhat static view of the relationship between people and the “New World” landscape (see Jones 1997). Ethnography, history, and modern Indigenous knowledge, however, each demonstrate dynamic movements of human populations in the Americas stemming from a variety of motivations: trade, immigration, forced relocation, pilgrimage, etc. It is tempting to frame these population movements within a broad paradigm of diasporas (see Dufoix 2013), however, we recognize this concept may not capture the nuances of population movements as dynamic, multi-scalar, and multi-vocal. In this session, we propose an exploration of population movements in the Americas through a variety of archaeological case studies to interrogate the ways in which population movements foment social change. Drawing initial inspiration from theories of diaspora, we challenge our participants to critically engage with the ways people materially construct or deconstruct their social identities in relation to others within the context of physical movement.

Organizer(s)

• Melissa Baltus

  Assistant Professor
  University of Toledo

Presenter(s)

• Melissa Baltus

  Assistant Professor
  University of Toledo

Chair(s)

• Jayur Mehta

  Assistant Professor
  Florida State University

Presenter(s)

• Jayur Mehta

  Assistant Professor
  Florida State University

• Guido Pezzarossi

  Assistant Professor
  Syracuse University

• Matthew Velasco

  Assistant Professor
  Cornell University

Discussant(s)

• Renya Ramirez

  University of California at Santa Cruz

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Cahokia Carried: Materiality and Movement of North America's Native City
  Melissa Rose Baltus – University of Toledo
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  Cahokia and its Impact across the Eastern Woodlands
  Jayur Madhusudan Mehta – Florida State University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Carried Assemblages: Resilient Ties, and Persisting Frictions in Colonial Guatemala
  Guido Pezzarossi – Syracuse University
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  Diaspora in the Late Prehispanic Andes: Disentangling Myth, Migration, and Mobility
  Matthew Carlos Velasco – Cornell University
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Discussion
  Renya K. Ramirez – University of California at Santa Cruz