front cover of Tenahaha and the Wari State
Tenahaha and the Wari State
A View of the Middle Horizon from the Cotahuasi Valley
Edited by Justin Jennings and Willy Yépez Álvarez
University of Alabama Press, 2015
The Middle Horizon period (A.D. 600–1000) was a time of sweeping cultural change in the Andes. Archaeologists have long associated this period with the expansion of the Wari (Huari) and Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) states in the south-central Andes and the Pacific coasts of contemporary Peru and Chile.
 
Tenahaha and the Wari State contains a series of essays that challenge current beliefs about the Wari state and suggest a reassessment of this pivotal era in Andean history. In this collection, a picture emerges of Wari power projected across the region’s rugged and formidable topography less as a conquering empire than as a source of ideas, styles, and material culture voluntarily adopted by neighboring peoples.
 
Much of the previous fieldwork on Wari history took place in the Wari heartland and in Wari strongholds, not areas where Wari power and influence were equivocal. In Tenahaha and the Wari State, editors Justin Jennings and Willy Yépez Álvarez set out to test whether current theories of the Wari state as a cohesive empire were accurate or simply reflective of the bias inherent in studying Wari culture in its most concentrated centers. The essays in this collection examine instead life in the Cotahuasi Valley, an area into which Wari influence expanded during the Middle Horizon period.
 
Drawing on ten years of exhaustive field work both at the ceremonial site of Tenahaha and in the surrounding valley, Jennings and Yépez Álvarez posit that Cotahuasinos at Tenahaha had little contact with the Wari state. Their excavations and survey in the area tell the story of a region in flux rather than of a people conquered by Wari. In a time of uncertainty, they adopted Wari ideas and culture as ways to cope with change.
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Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece
Manipulating Material Culture
Lisa C. Nevett, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2017
In the modern world, objects and buildings speak eloquently about their creators. Status, gender identity, and cultural affiliations are just a few characteristics we can often infer about such material culture. But can we make similar deductions about the inhabitants of the first millennium BCE Greek world? Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece offers a series of case studies exploring how a theoretical approach to the archaeology of this area provides insight into aspects of ancient society.

An introductory section exploring the emergence and growth of theoretical approaches is followed by examinations of the potential insights these approaches provide. The authors probe some of the meanings attached to ancient objects, townscapes, and cemeteries, for those who created, and used, or inhabited them.

The range of contexts stretches from the early Greek communities during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, through Athens between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, and on into present day Turkey and the Levant during the third and second centuries BCE. The authors examine a range of practices, from the creation of individual items such as ceramic vessels and figurines, through to the construction of civic buildings, monuments, and cemeteries. At the same time they interrogate a range of spheres, from craft production, through civic and religious practices, to funerary ritual.

 

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Things
Edited by Bill Brown
University of Chicago Press, 2004
This book is an invitation to think about why children chew pencils; why we talk to our cars, our refrigerators, our computers; rosary beads and worry beads; Cuban cigars; why we no longer wear hats that we can tip to one another and why we don't seem to long to; what has been described as bourgeois longing. It is an invitation to think about the fetishism of daily life in different times and in different cultures. It is an invitation to rethink several topics of critical inquiry—camp, collage, primitivism, consumer culture, museum culture, the aesthetic object, still life, "things as they are," Renaissance wonders, "the thing itself"—within the rubric of "things," not in an effort to foreclose the question of what sort of things these seem to be, but rather to suggest new questions about how objects produce subjects, about the phenomenology of the material everyday, about the secret life of things.

Based on an award-winning special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, Things features eighteen thought-evoking essays by contributors including Bill Brown, Matthew L. Jones, Bruno Latour, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jessica Riskin, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Peter Schwenger, Charity Scribner, and Alan Trachtenberg.
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Traces Behind the Esmeraldas Shore
Warren DeBoer
University of Alabama Press, 1996

Although long famous for its antiquities—notably intricate goldwork, elaborate pottery, and earthen mounds—the Santiago-Cayapas region of coastal Ecuador has been relatively neglected from the standpoint of scientific archaeology. Until recently, no sound chronology was available, and even the approximate age of the region's most impressive monument, the large and much-looted site of La Tolita, remained in doubt.

Building on evidence obtained during the last decade, this book documents an eventful prehistory for Santiago-Cayapas that spans three millennia. A highlight of this prehistory was the reign of La Tolita as a regional center from 200 B.C. to A.D. 350. Archaeological data from
La Tolita's hinterland indicate a complex and changing social landscape in which La Tolita's hegemony was never absolute nor uncontested.

Abundantly illustrated and written in a crisp, witty, and occasionally irreverent style, Traces Behind the Esmeraldas Shore will stimulate debate and rankle interpretive conventions about those social formations that archaeologists gloss as 'chiefdoms.'

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Traces of the Past
Classics between History and Archaeology
Karen Bassi
University of Michigan Press, 2016
What are we doing when we walk into an archaeological museum or onto an archaeological site? What do the objects and features we encounter in these unique places mean and, more specifically, how do they convey to us something about the beliefs and activities of formerly living humans? In short, how do visible remains and ruins in the present give meaning to the human past? Karen Bassi addresses these questions through detailed close readings of canonical works spanning the archaic to the classical periods of ancient Greek culture, showing how the past is constituted in descriptions of what narrators and characters see in their present context. She introduces the term protoarchaeological to refer to narratives that navigate the gap between linguistic representation and empirical observation—between words and things—in accessing and giving meaning to the past. Such narratives invite readers to view the past as a receding visual field and, in the process, to cross the disciplinary boundaries that divide literature, history, and archaeology.

Aimed at classicists, literary scholars, ancient historians, cultural historians, and archaeological theorists, the book combines three areas of research: time as a feature of narrative structure in literary theory; the concept of “the past itself” in the philosophy of history; and the ontological status of material objects in archaeological theory. Each of five central chapters explores how specific protoarchaeological narratives—from the fate of Zeus’ stone in Hesiod’s Theogony to the contest between words and objects in Aristophanes’ Frogs—both expose and attempt to bridge this gap. Throughout, the book serves as a response to Herodotus’ task in writing the Histories, namely, to ensure that “the past deeds of men do not fade with time.”

 


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Tracing the Relational
The Archaeology of Worlds, Spirits, and Temporalities
Meghan E. Buchanan and B. Jacob Skousen
University of Utah Press, 2015
Tracing the Relational examines the recent emergence of relational ontologies in archaeological interpretation and how this perspective can help archaeologists better understand the past. Traditional representational approaches reflect modern or Western perspectives, which focus on the individual and see the world in terms of dichotomies that separate culture and nature, human and object, sacred and secular. In contrast, ancient societies saw themselves as connected to and entangled with other human and nonhuman entities. In order to gain deeper insight into how people in the ancient world lived, experienced, and negotiated their lives, contributors argue, archaeologists must explore the myriad relationships and entanglements between humans and other beings, places, and things. As contributors unravel these relationships, they demonstrate that movement is an inherent feature of these relational webs and is the driving force behind a continually shifting reality. Chapters focus on various regions and time periods throughout the Americas, tracing how movements between other-worldly dimensions, spirits and deities, and temporalities were integral to everyday life.
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Transforming the Dead
Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest
Eve A. Hargrave
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Transforming the Dead is a collection of essays that examines culturally modified human bones and their roles as “cultural and ritual objects” among prehistoric Eastern Woodland cultures. Previous scholarship has explored the role of human body parts in Native American cultures as trophies of war and revered ancestors. This collection discusses new evidence that human elements were also important components of daily and ritual activities across the Eastern Woodlands. The contributors to this volume discuss each case study within the unique regional and temporal contexts of the material, rather than seeking universal answers to how these objects were used.
 
Most research addressing modified human bone has focused on cut marks and trauma associated with warfare, trophy taking, and burial practices. The editors and contributors of Transforming the Dead document the varied and often overlooked ways that human bone was intentionally modified through drilling, incising, cutting, and polishing for utilitarian, ornamental, spiritual, or ritual use. Examples include bracelets and gorgets to be worn, as well as musical rasps, pipe stems, masks, and protective talismans. The form and function of these objects are not unusual; their construction from the remains of “another” sets them apart.
 
Through a flexible but systematic analysis of the archaeological record, the contributors bring into focus how the careful selection, modification, and retention of particular bones or body parts of an individual after death offer insights into concepts of personhood, the body, life, and death among the prehistoric Native Americans in the Midwest.
 

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