Ancestral Landscapes Research Articles

Building culturally meaningful chronologies: negotiating Indigenous and Western temporalities in Oceania

ABSTRACTThis paper examines some of the ways in which Indigenous and Western archaeological chronologies are being negotiated and entwined in Oceania. Indigenous pasts are often known through oral traditions, genealogies and ancestral landscapes; these are vital pasts populated by the ancestors. The archaeological past is often interpreted through taphonomy, stratigraphy and direct dating techniques. There are tensions and intersections between these perspectives, and research partnerships between archaeologists and Indigenous communities must negotiate how to build chronologies and narrate the past. Drawing on case studies from our research in Australia and Papua New Guinea, we discuss how these seemingly different ways of knowing the past can be brought into productive conversation and how these understandings are transforming today. We argue that incorporating diverse temporalities for ancestral places can generate richer historical narratives of value to communities and researchers.

Territories of Water and Sand. The configuration of the Huave territory between time and space in San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, Mexico

The Huave town of San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca, is located on the sand bar in the Tehuantepec isthmus's lagoon area. Diverse categories were identified using a horizontal methodology approach and grounded theory. One of them is the territory, which, from its lagoon geography, gave rise to a tangible and intangible fabric between time and space through the relationships between water, sand, winds, and stars, creating a cosmo-existence and conviviality that persists today, manifesting itself in living through fishing, partying, and housing. These are particular situations of this culture that, through the natural entities, transform the territory and allow the naming of ancestral landscapes of the poetic sublime. This way of living between water and sand is the materialization of a culture's territorialization processes, particularly the huave/ikoots.

Retrieving landscape

This article focuses on two methods employed in the selection, interpretation, and representation of diverse source materials for developing alternative biographies for my ancestral landscape - Nanhai district in the Pearl River Delta in southern China. These biographies aim to approach Nanhai from a long view of continual transformation, as opposed to prevalent readings of the region that focus on the striking spatial contrasts and large-scale developments that have only come about in recent decades. The chronological reading explores a critical shift in the cosmological understanding of the landscape situated in the 19th century through a selection of historical gazetteer maps, while in the excavational reading the diffuse continuity of the lineage in the present-day landscape of Nanhai is traced. In both methods, the drawing functions as a crucial (research) tool to engage the range of source materials.

Architectural Landscape. A New Interpretation of the Sloping Ceiling of Rekhmire’s Tomb Chapel (TT 100)

The tomb TT 100, belonging to the vizier Rekhmire, in the Theban necropolis (Luxor, Egypt), one of the best examples of funerary architecture of the Egyptian New Kingdom, has been widely studied since the beginning of the 20th century from the iconographic, historical and archaeological points of view. However, it has an anomalous structural feature for the classic Theban tomb typology of this period: a longitudinal corridor with a sloping ceiling ending in a combination of false stela and niche for a funerary statue. The anomaly, widely noted in classical literature, has been vaguely explained and often forgotten due to the celebrated decorative program that occupies the tomb.This study aims to offer a reinterpretation of this architectural feature of the tomb based on a landscape archaeology approach. According to this methodology, the ancestral landscape of the necropolis, and the architectural and artistic features of the tomb of his relative and predecessor in the vizierate Useramun are significant elements for the interpretation of this element. The main result is Rekhmire’s clear intention to emulate and replicate Useramun’s double funerary structure, not only from the artistic point of view (already demonstrated in previous studies) but also from the spatial point of view, copying the phenomenological experience of space and landscape in the architectural development of his tomb. An example of how landscape archaeology can be useful in the study of the art of this ancient culture.

Climate & Language: An Entangled Crisis

Abstract Rising ocean levels threaten entire communities with relocation. The continued erosion of Arctic coastlines due to melting ice sheets and thawing permafrost has forced Inuit communities to move to more secure locations. Each move dislodges Indigenous peoples and their languages from ancestral landscapes and ways of knowing, obligating communities to adopt colonial or majority languages. Scholars and activists have documented the intersections of climate change and language endangerment, with special focus paid to their compounding consequences. We consider the relationship between language and environmental ideologies, synthesizing previous research on how metaphors and communicative norms in Indigenous and colonial languages and cultures influence environmental beliefs and actions. We note that these academic discourses-as well as similar discourses in nonprofit and policy-making spheres-rightly acknowledge the importance of Indigenous thought to environmental and climate action. Sadly, they often fall short of acknowledging both the colonial drivers of Indigenous language “loss” and Indigenous ownership of Indigenous language and environmental knowledge. We propose alternative framings that emphasize colonial responsibility and Indigenous sovereignty. Finally, we reflect on emergent vitalities and radical hope in Indigenous language movements and climate justice movements.

A Pedagogy of Water: Rio Grande/Rio Bravo as Ancestral Waters

The purpose of this research project is to facilitate intergenerational teaching and learning of Indigenous knowledge by the frontera communities of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. Our river is our main source of clean water, and is also a militarized, international border between the US and Mexico. I used the stories and teachings of local Indigenous elders to create a Pedagogy of Water that focuses on the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo as part of the sacred, ancestral landscape of south Texas. This project strengthens the community by connecting multiple generations to the land and river where we live, and demonstrates the perseverance of Indigenous peoples and knowledges through time.

Interpreting the mammal deposits of Cloggs Cave (SEAustralia),GunaiKurnaiAboriginal Country, through community‐led partnership research

AbstractPalaeontological animal bone deposits are rarely investigated through research partnerships where the local First Nations communities have a defining hand in both the research questions asked and the research processes. Here we report research undertaken through such a partnership approach at the iconic archaeological site of Cloggs Cave (GunaiKurnai Country, East Gippsland), in the southern foothills of SE Australia's Great Dividing Range.A new excavation was combined with detailed chronometric dating, high‐resolution 3D mapping and geomorphological studies. This allowed interpretation of a sequence of stratigraphic layers spanning from a lowermost excavated mixed layer dated to between 25,640 and 48,470 cal BP, to a dense set of uppermost, ash layers dated to between 1460 and 3360 cal BP. This long and well‐dated chronostratigraphic sequence enabled temporal trends in the abundant small mammal remains to be examined.The fossil assemblage consists of at least 31 taxa of mammals which change in proportions through time. Despite clear evidence that the Old Ancestors repeatedly carried vegetation into the cave to fuel cool fires (no visible vegetation grows in Cloggs Cave), we observed little to no evidence of cooking fires or calcined bone, suggesting that people had little involvement with the accumulation of the faunal remains. Small mammal bones were most likely deposited in the cave by large disc‐faced owls,Tyto novaehollandae(Masked Owl) orTyto tenebricosa(Sooty Owl).Despite being well dated and largely undisturbed, the Cloggs Cave assemblage does not appear to track known Late Quaternary environmental change. Instead, the complex geomorphology of the area fostered a vegetation mosaic that supported mammals with divergent habitat preferences. The faunal deposit suggests a local ancestral landscape characterised by a resilient mosaic of habitats that persisted over thousands of years, signalling that the Old Ancestors burned landscape fires to encourage and manage patches of different vegetation types and ages within and through periods of climate change.Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

Reimagining U.S. Federal Land Management through Decolonization and Indigenous Value Systems

U.S. Federal Land Management Areas (FLMAs) are grounded in settler colonialism, including Indigenous land dispossessions and violations of Tribal treaties. This critical thought-piece is written by Indigenous scholars to reimagine FLMAs (especially recreation areas) through decolonization and the Indigenous value systems embedded within the “four Rs”: relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution. We reweave conceptions about parks and protected areas, reimagine park management, and reconfigure management foci to reflect Indigenous value systems shared by Indigenous peoples. We emphasize a need for Tribal comanagement of FLMAs, the inclusion of Tribal land management practices across ecosystems, and the restoration of Indigenous land use and management rights. Land and recreation managers can use this paper to 1) decolonize park management practices, 2) understand how Indigenous value systems can inform park management foci, and 3) build a decolonized and reciprocal relationship with Tribes and their ancestral landscapes.

"La cartografía social como herramienta de investigación participativa del territorio. Diagnosis de paisajes ancestrales en comunidades indígenas de la Amazonia ecuatoriana"

The analysis of the landscape and its characterization is usually carried out from quantitative perspectives, that is, its value as established in relation to its physical characteristics and the potential use of its resources. However, misguided diagnoses and the application of ineffective management strategies question these methodologies and reveal the need to generate new epistemologies and qualitative research methods for the subject -place relationship. The objective is to analyze the potential of social cartography as a participatory action research tool (IAP) to represent and characterize ancestral landscapes of the Ecuadorian Amazon. To this effect, the community narratives with respect to place have been used to register elements in their symbolic and cultural values. It is concluded that social cartography is a fundamental strategy of sovereignty and a political instrument to offer a true perspective of the community sense of place from within and without.

Landscape change as a platform for environmental and social healing

ABSTRACT Aotearoa New Zealand is characterised by dynamic landscapes. Major landscape-altering events, such as earthquakes, floods, landslides and tsunami, have deeply influenced the relationships that many Māori, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, have with their ancestral landscapes. This work documents perspectives of landscape change from five Māori individuals from various iwi (tribes) and hapū (kin groups) around Aotearoa New Zealand, who have strong ties with their tūrangawaewae (place of connection). In exercising the Māori principle of whanaungatanga, we conducted semi-structured interviews following a general inductive approach over a series of meetings. This research indicates that no matter the cause of a landscape-altering event, connections, sustainability, reciprocity and adaptability are core values to uphold. These values can be used to guide human activity and involvement pertaining to responding to the event days, months and years after. This work also indicates that altered landscapes have a natural way of healing themselves through time, and that people play an important role in defining landscape change and recovery following landscape-altering events.

Working with the Ancestors: Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands by Emily C Donaldson

Reviewed by: Working with the Ancestors: Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands by Emily C Donaldson Seth Quintus Working with the Ancestors: Mana and Place in the Marquesas Islands, by Emily C Donaldson. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. isbn hardback: 9780295745824; isbn paper: 9780295745831, 280 pages. Hardback, us$95.00; paper, us$30.00 In Working with the Ancestors, Emily Donaldson provides welcome documentation of the enduring importance—yet ambiguous significance—of ancestral landscapes in Oceania. While focused on the Marquesas, Donaldson’s primary thesis will resonate with scholars across the region who are grappling with the idea of ancestral landscapes as spaces actively negotiated by multiple stakeholders. However, the analysis of how these landscape negotiations intersect with contemporary issues of historic preservation and conservation within the context of global heritage development is perhaps the work’s most important contribution. Donaldson’s sensitive attention to the complexity of these issues has resulted in a multi-faceted work well suited for a broad audience. While the disparate narrative may at times raise questions about Donaldson’s primary purpose, the text as a whole hangs together sufficiently to raise the question of whether this complexity is, after all, the point, as stakeholders of different backgrounds bring into view distinct engagements with place and the past. This ethnography brings contested meanings and events to life through an effective melding of voices, substantive global comparisons, and theoretical contextualization. The first chapters provide a background that helps the reader to understand the complexity of land rights in the Marquesas. While readers familiar with Oceania will recognize many elements of this form of land tenure, it is nevertheless enlightening to read about this manifestation within the context of mission activity and French territorial governance. Importantly, these chapters highlight the changing meanings of ancestral landscapes and the contexts that give rise to those meanings. This sets the stage for the latter three chapters, which operationalize this background to contextualize the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco) world heritage movement within the Marquesas. [End Page 278] There is a contemporary tendency, especially in the West but also globally, to view archaeological remains, ruins, and historical landscapes as divorced from present concerns, apart from their place in educating the present about the past. This is probably best typified, as Donaldson points out, by the fortress approach to historic preservation, which seeks to limit the kinds of engagement with these resources. The goal of this approach is preservation and maintenance of the site for tourist consumption and, at times, targeted cultural activities. The meaning and value of a site or landscape is often defined by professionals—generally foreign archaeologists—rather than by those who have land-use rights. It is not difficult, then, to see how tensions might arise between the goals of local communities and those of state and national heritage projects. As Donaldson discusses, these tensions arise for several reasons, ranging from the increased territorialization of land to perceived disconnects between ancestors and the people interpreting the behaviors of those ancestors. Even within small communities, tensions can arise regarding the interpretation of ancestral places and the potential of heritage to increase tourism and, therefore, to bring about an improved economic future. As an archaeologist who works in Oceania, I found this book engaging and thoughtful. It left me considering in a more nuanced way how people think about the past and how meaning about the past is produced and eventually used. Important in this discussion is the definition of the word “heritage.” Donaldson notes that the term is not widely understood—or at least has different meanings—in the Marquesas (121). This is an important point in that it demonstrates a different way in which people engage with the past. In as much as heritage is “what the ancestors left for the people of today” (121), the work of world heritage is an overarching paradigm that structures how one should engage with and think about the past. The growth of a heritage industry or heritage initiatives, while perhaps not intending to, can change how communities think about and interact with their past and ancestral places. The foundational issue that Donaldson confronts in Working with...

3Wombs of the Earth: Preserving and Reconstituting Feminine Prestige and Dignity through Heritage

ABSTRACTA select group of Boreda women in southern Ethiopia bolster their sense of prestige and dignity as mothers and leaders through their ancestral landscapes, Bayira Deriya. These Boreda women conveyed their knowledge to me and endowed me with the responsibility to share it only after my longitudinal commitment to becoming a listening cultural apprentice and after becoming a mother. Importantly, their wisdom taught me an alternative way of perceiving motherhood and gender justice and led to a significant scientific discovery for the world.

A Sustainable Approach to the Threatened Landscape Through the Visual Arts

During recent decades, global warming and rapid climate change have led to an increase in forest fires worldwide and especially in the territories of south-central Chile and Chilean Patagonia, modifying the landscape of these areas. These events generate a fracture in the aesthetic perception of territories. The natural, ancestral landscape is threatened by imminent transformation. Fire destroys its ancient forests and its biodiversity. Paradoxically, this dramatic, catastrophic action generates an image of rare beauty; an “aesthetic of devastation”, born of its ineluctable disintegration. Everything is transformed from live plant matter to the inert remains of what was once a dense, flourishing, ancient forest. The green woodland is transformed into charred trunks, charcoal, and finally ashes. Erosion threatens to change the image of our landscape and the life that inhabits it. Artistic creation reflects this implacable process, and how nature is transformed into something different; what appears to be an equilibrium of astonishing aesthetic beauty becomes an anti-aesthetic natural phenomenon with its own strange beauty, now disfigured and warped by disaster. Today violation, systematic destruction, waste of resources and the total lack of protection for our environment wake in the artist an act of reaction-creation, the representation of which through art can show this loss of equilibrium and express the progressive vulnerability of our environment and its inevitable perdition. Artistic creation is a medium which can emphasise the importance of caring for our natural heritage in order to maintain the sustainability of this equilibrium.

Ancestral proportions based on 22 autosomal STRs of an admixed population (Mestizos) from the Península of Yucatán, México

Latin American populations trace their ancestry mainly to Post Columbian admixture among Native Americans (NA), Europeans, and Africans during nearly 500 years. Although historic and anthropological records suggest that the Peninsula of Yucatan (Southeast, Mexico) has as a large NA origin principally of Mayan ethnicity, they have been poorly studied with autosomal STRs. Thus, the ancestral proportion of Mestizos (admixed) from the Peninsula of Yucatan, was assessed by genotyping 687 subjects for 22 autosomal STRs (Powerplex Fusion system). STR databases from other Mexican Mestizos were included for the admixture analysis (North, West, and Center regions), Hispanic Americans, in addition to European, NA, and African genetic pools as ancestral references. The best fit of population clusters obtained with Structure (K = 5), suggests that Mestizos from the Southeast are principally composed by NA (64.9%), followed by European (33.7%) and African (1.3%) ancestries. This was the highest among the compared Mexican Mestizo populations (range: 51.5–64.3%) and Hispanics (32.9%). Conversely, the European ancestry in the southeast is the lowest among Mexican-Mestizos (range: 33.7–48.5%) and Hispanics (60.2%). Differences with previous reports based on lesser number of STRs could be explained by intrapopulation structure due to socioeconomic and educational factors, as has been previously described in Mexican-Mestizos. This particular ancestral landscape justifies the creation of local STR databases for human identification purposes in Mexico.

Past as Prophecy: Indigenous Diplomacies beyond Liberal Settler Regimes of Recognition, as Told in Shell

According to a prophecy told in a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, the seeds of Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to more-than-human kin will once again flourish in the ruins of colonial orders. Even settlers will be forced to turn to Indigenous knowledges because “they have destroyed everything else”. Following this visionary history-future, this article asks how Indigenous diplomacies and temporalities animate resurgent possibilities for making life within the fractures (and apocalyptic ruins) of settler states. This demands a rethinking of the global and the international from the perspective of deep Indigenous histories. I draw on research visiting ancestral landscapes with community members, discussing a trip to an ancient shell mound and a contemporary cemetery in which shells are laid atop grave plots. These stories evoke a long-term history of shifting and multivalient shell use across religious and temporal differences. They speak to practices of acknowledgement that exceed liberal settler regimes of state recognition and extend from much older diplomatic practices.

Community Identity and Shared Practice at Actuncan, Belize

Shared identities create deep historical ties to community spaces and can facilitate or constrict political expansion. This research examines the relationship between the ways in which families engaged local landscapes and developed shared identities at Actuncan, Belize, during the Terminal Classic period, a time when the city experienced population growth as surrounding centers declined. The nature and location of activity patterns in and around three residential groups allow inferences about shared practices and the expression of identities that those activities enabled and constrained. Importantly, this research includes investigations of both residential groups and architecturally free areas. It uses multiple methods to explore activities and to produce overlapping datasets, including excavation and analysis of macroartifacts, microartifacts, and soil chemical residues. The results suggest that Actuncan residents used not only the formal patio spaces of residential groups but also the interstitial spaces between them. Moreover, one residential group, Group 1, appears to have been a locus for distinct activities including sequential burials and, possibly, affiliative ritual practices connected to ancestral landscape use. Understanding relationships among residents is an important foundation for exploring broader political dynamics, including relationships between residents and rulers and how rulers created, legitimized, and maintained power and authority.

Haumanu ipukarea, ki uta ki tai: (re)connecting to landscape and reviving the sense of belonging for health and wellbeing

ABSTRACTIn Aotearoa/New Zealand landscapes were personified by the Indigenous Māori through the contention that the relationship with the land forms the basis of their existence, where everything visible and invisible, tangible and intangible is inseparable. However, in the current context, cultural and ancestral landscapes have been desecrated by growing demands from colonization, capitalism, urbanization, and globalization. This article explores the potential for reinstating the ideologies associated with traditional Indigenous knowledge and the intricacies of interconnectedness between environments and people for improved health and wellbeing. It examines new ways of integrating Māori knowledge in design to expand the concepts of belonging, identity, quality of life and place. Taking a case study approach, it focuses on an infested waterway that meanders through a regenerating valley system at the heart of Wellington, the capital of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The study encapsulates the notions of ki uta ki tai (to the mountains to the sea) and hīkoi (traditional form of walking and talking with the land and exhuming meaning) and looks at healing remaining endemic ecologies in an attempt to recreate identity and sense of belonging. It hereby assists in reconnecting Māori and connecting non-Māori to their natural surroundings, following bicultural and Indigenous constructs.

Masculinity and Conversion in Old English Guthlac A

The article turns to Judith Butler’s writings on abjection to elucidate the Christian subjectivity that emerges from the Old English poetic life of Guthlac of Crowland, known as Guthlac A. The abject is defined as the other within the subject who is in the process of conversion from secular values and the Germanic past. Guthlac’s conversion from his secular and ancestral values informs a notion of masculinity nascent in his subjectivity, masculinity that results from the abjection of ancestral secular identity by transposing it onto the demonic other, the destruction of which transforms and sanitizes ancestral landscape.

Seniority through ancestral landscapes: Community archaeology in the highlands of southern Ethiopia

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on our collaboration with the Boreda of southern Ethiopia to document the ways in which their cultural heritage knowledge is entwined with Ochollo Mulato, one of their nine tangible senior ancestral landscapes or Bayira Deriya. Through the interface between oral traditions, life histories, and the archaeological record, we grew increasingly aware of the descendant community’s wide range of alternative but equally valid memories and attachments to their ancestral lands. Articulated through the landscape at Ochollo Mulato, Boreda demonstrated to us the various historical paths for defending assertions of seniority between youths and elders and between farmers and craft-specialists.

The First Acadian Film: Visibility, Modernity, and Landscape in Les aboiteaux

In 1955, on the bicentenary of the Acadian deportation, the National Film Board released Les aboiteaux, the first film with an original Acadian script and one that spoke volumes about the changing contours of Acadian identity in the postwar period. Directed by Léonard Forest, one of the many Acadian artists depicting their society's engagement with modernity, the film challenged the Acadian self-image of constituting a diasporic people. Instead, Les aboiteaux advanced a more territorial view of Acadian identity, grounded in places such as southeastern New Brunswick where the film takes place. Here Acadians were still living on a landscape created by their pre-deportation forebears through the construction of a system of dykes, known as aboiteaux, which drained the marshlands and allowed the people to settle along the rivers that flowed into the Bay of Fundy. By the 1940s, economic circumstances had led to the decay of the aboiteaux, and so Forest's film, using local actors to give it a documentary feel, describes one Acadian community trying to preserve the ancestral landscape. It shows modern techniques, introduced by the federal Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration, which were able to coexist with more traditional ways, suggesting a bright future for Acadians in a territory they could call their own.