Agency in a Postmold? Physicality and the Archaeology of Culture-Making

Abstract

Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales.Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American midcontinent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historicalprocessual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis. KEY WORDS: agency; practice; architecture; Mississippian.Recent trends in archaeology bring fundamental anthropological questions back to the drawing board: What causes cultural change? How are we to understand it? Admittedly, some contemporary answers to these questions may seem more complicated than the questions themselves, involving theories-agency, practice, performance, landscape, embodiment, etc.-around which a succession of avant-garde camps have pitched their tents (

TÉCNICAS LÍTICAS DIVERSAS ENTRE LAS SOCIEDADES DE ANTOFAGASTA DE LA SIERRA (PUNA MERIDIONAL ARGENTINA) POSTERIORES A ca. 1100 AP

“…Ahora bien, acercarse a la complejidad de límites y grupos sociales y sus identidades, requiere documentar la variabilidad práctica y los productos de ésta no solo a través del espacio sino también del tiempo, comparando genealogías o historias de prácticas (Pauketat y Alt 2005). Es por ello que recurrimos a información publicada sobre conjuntos líticos asociados a cronologías previas a ca.…”

PostScript: Doing Agency in Archaeology

“…It would be possible to argue that Cerro Palenque was the product of self-conscious actions by a small group of actors who determined that the new settlement should be built, and initiated each of the individual building projects, although such an assertion would require ignoring the many variations in building plan and construction techniques and use of materials involved that suggest decentralization of these construction projects. But even if the innovation of a new large settlement were attributed to the agency of a few self-conscious actors, the tactical occupation of the site through everyday circulation and acts of daily life would still need to be acknowledged as repeated practices critical to the maintenance of the settlement, and the reproduction in the persons tracing trajectories through it of dispositions to act in certain ways (similarly, see Martin, 2005;Owoc, 2005;Pauketat and Alt, 2005;Sassaman, 2005).…”

Making as a didactic process: Situated cognition and the chaîne opératoire

“…The extent to which artifacts are implicated in shaping the very aspects of the past societies that archaeologists endeavour to study, is a topic that has received much recent attention (e.g. Pauketat and Alt, 2005;Knappett, 2007;Boivin, 2008;Alberti and Marshall, 2009;Olsen, 2010;Hodder, 2012;Ingold, 2013;Malafouris, 2013). Indeed, operationalizing the concept of materiality in archaeological practice, and the importance of understanding the involvement of materials in patterning long term social processes are topics at the forefront of archaeological theory.…”