Archaeological Ethnography Research Articles

Ottoman archaeology between the Self and the Other: archaeological ethnography and the transborder research potential of the SW Balkans

ABSTRACT Religious syncretism alongside the coexistence of various groups of people and their shared material culture was a reality in the Ottoman-era Balkans. Such entanglements remain underrepresented in archaeological theory and practice because of the temporal proximity of the subject to the present and due to the cultural and identity politics of nation-state formation. This article offers a method to delve into the aforementioned archaeological context through a combined investigation of textual evidence, survey and archaeological ethnography. The case studies presented draw from the cultural landscapes and the material culture of the transborder area of Northwest Greece and Southern Albania. Emphasis is placed on the agency of the local actors who dwelled in the region and are often neglected when placed in the context of the broader accounts of the Ottoman era.

La centralidad de los abordajes educativos en los trabajos colaborativos de la arqueología con comunidades tradicionales en la Amazonía brasileña (2017-2022)

This article explores the significance of educational approaches in collaborative archaeology projects with traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon. From 2017 to 2022, we worked with riverside populations in Sustainable Use Conservation Units along the mid-Solimões River in Amazonas. Through this collaboration, we identified a local system of mutual aid among families, which relates to the communities’ pursuit of autonomy since the 1980s. The research was conducted through a technical-scientific cooperation agreement between the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the University of São Paulo (MAE-USP) and the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development (IDSM), with financial support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation from 2017 to 2019. All work was approved by the IDSM Ethics and Research Committee. Our goal was to engage schools, teachers, and students with archaeology by developing educational activities. We used heritage education methodologies and active listening techniques, informed by archaeological ethnography and oral history, to incorporate local knowledge into our research. The study involved collaboration with community leaders, artisans, teachers, and elders. This context calls for collaborative archaeological practices that seek mutual benefits and deepen the understanding of material culture and historical timelines. Educational initiatives play a crucial role in scientific work, fostering balanced exchanges between archaeological and community perspectives, additionally contributing to the production of more differences based on the notion of kinship.

Decolonising the archaeology of indigenous artisanal gold mining in Eastern Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will look at how I utilised archaeological ethnography as a methodology to study ancient and contemporary indigenous gold mining practices in Eastern Zimbabwe. Subsequently, I will present an archaeological field research that I undertook at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites between 2016 and 2017 and move on to show how material culture recovered was collaboratively interpreted in conversations with contemporary indigenous gold miners. I argue that by using archaeological ethnography as a field methodology that privileges multivocality, this ultimately decolonised archaeology's underlying politics which is protected by expert hegemonic discourses. During the field study at Nyahokwe and Saungweme sites artisanal miners popularly known as makorokozas revealed their localised understanding of crucibles and hammerstones that were recovered during both archaeological excavations and surface collections. Thus, used as decolonised methodology, archaeological ethnography allowed for multiple voices to be embraced in archaeological knowledge production.

Heritage-making in the capitalocene: deconstructing fishing heritage and regeneration in an English fishing port

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how heritage-led regeneration has mediated the reconfiguration of North Shields Fish Quay. North Shields is a town in the North East of England, once home to among Britain’s largest deep-sea trawling fleets. Following the collapse of the trawling industry in the late twentieth century, ongoing fisheries crisis, and undelivered Brexit promises, fishing heritage has become valued as a tool for social and economic development. However, this deployment of heritage generates both opportunities and threats. Situated between contemporary archaeology and critical heritage studies, this paper employs archaeological ethnography and critical discourse analysis to examine the material and discursive unfolding of heritage-led regeneration at North Shields Fish Quay. I situate heritage-making in the Capitalocene and argue that heritage-led regeneration represents a capitalist response to capitalism-induced crisis. By foregrounding the long-term exploitation and alienation of fishing communities, and their physical and social separation from the landscape, this paper demonstrates that heritage-led regeneration profits from, perpetuates and obscures these abuses.

"The Fake"

Inspired by a conversation with Doran Ross (1947–2020), a leading African art scholar and curator who revolutionized the field of African art, this article discusses the adventures of fieldwork – in particular, its unpredictable nature. More specifically, it presents my experiences conducting an archaeological ethnography of nineteenth-century Islamic talismans in Asante (Ghana), and the matter of the “fake”. Islamic talismans comprise inscriptions written directly onto paper, folded, encased in a string binding, and sewn into small leather or silver pouches, to be worn, hung, and/or buried. Engaging artifacts, texts, and their stories passed down through the generations, I studied Islamic talismans together with their owners and/or custodians, most of whom were unaware of their contents until we examined them together. In this article, I reveal how on one occasion, we examined a talisman that was different. Ostensibly the “genuine” article, this simulated object emulated talismans’ outwardly material features, but instead contained a small piece of wood rather than paper inscriptions.

Indigenous Heritage and Ontological Conflicts in the Southcentral Andes

Abstract: Taking inspiration from the epistemological potential of the Aymara concept of taypi this contribution aims to show the persistence of Indigenous peoples' self-determination and community governance in contemporary heritage politics. A multisited archaeological ethnography across Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and the Calchaquí valleys (Tucumán, Argentina) brings to light the long memories of anti-colonial resistance in the southcentral Andes and visualizes heritage-making practices in their ecological dimension, bridging multiple temporalities and territorial relatedness. The resulting picture figures a deep-seated tension between regulatory policies that adjust indigenous heritage to universal classifications and values embedded in the modern nation-state imaginaries, and emancipatory politics in which heritage claims are entangled with the social reproduction of community life and with the reparation of historical injustices. This twofold political dimension materializes in the legal artefact of the free, prior, informed consultation (FPIC), whose long memory of ambiguity is traced down to the early day of colonization. The article argues that consent-seeking mechanisms create an intermediate space where universal and place-based worldmaking designs converge. Locating these grey areas in time and space is crucial for addressing intercultural histories and future-oriented practices of heritage rights.

‘Around the hut’: an archaeological ethnography around the experimental construction of a shepherd’s hut in Konitsa, north-west Greece

SUMMARY This article reflects on the experimental building of a Vlach hut that took place in the 14th Summer School of the Balkan Border Crossings Network. The approach took the form of an archaeological ethnography and addressed a variety of subjects from ethnographic and experimental fieldworkto videography and critical heritage, all emerging from the same point: thebuilding of a shepherd’s roundhut in the plain of Konitsa. From interdisciplinary methodological encounters to reflections on pastoral identities, legislation and its effects on this built pastoral heritage, as well as fieldwork reflections, while experiencing and experimenting, this article reveals potential avenues for interdisciplinary engagement in contexts such as Summer Schools.

Minding the gap: Attempts at community archaeology and local counter-narratives at an archaeological site in Turkey

Community archaeologies should emerge from an awareness of the ways in which archaeological praxis is embedded with multiple pasts, subjectivities, materialities, and national and transnational histories. This longitudinal archaeological ethnography explores the lived experiences, perceptions of the past, and relationship to archaeology and archaeologists amongst villagers residing near the Kerkenes site in Turkey after attempts by the project to develop heritage awareness, a sustainable local economy, and collaborative management of the site within the community. However well-intentioned, considerable challenges to closing the gap in understanding between archaeologists and locals can arise when the efforts of archaeologists become entangled in larger socio-political frameworks beyond their control. Villagers have experienced being dehumanized as Muslim migrant workers in Europe and were Islamic-based nationalist supporters of the conservative Erdoğan regime. The archaeologists’ heritage-making practices inadvertently triggered symbolic associations of the project with the colonial endeavor. Locals produced counter-narratives about the site as a decolonizing response.

Teaching, researching and living in the field: the challenges of applied ethnography as education.

Every summer for the past four years, a small group of Greek and foreign students gather at the mountainous village of Gonies Malevyziou in central Crete to participate in the monthly International Field School “Engaging Local Communities in Heritage Management through Archaeological Ethnography”, organized by the Heritage Management Organization and the Cultural Association of Gonies. Teaching ethnography to non-anthropologists in the field is a challenging process as it brings to the fore multiple and interchanging roles for teachers and students alike. In this process of collective ethnographic learning, where the teaching setting is also our living setting and research setting, we often wonder about the entangled roles in the production of knowledge and interpretations articulated through theoretical readings, daily chores and lived experience. The demands of active research running side by side to methodological instruction and teaching create different expectations that shape the learning experience in unpredictable ways. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in this process: What is the position of members of the local community as producers, instigators and transmitters of this knowledge? How are our multiple identities as teachers, researchers, friends, visitors, locals/non-locals articulated within and outside the field? Finally, how is the knowledge produced managed and controlled by the community and the people responsible for the summer school?

Politics, Migration and Race. A Conversation with Yannis Hamilakis

Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the Brown University (USA). His main research and teaching interests are the socio-politics of the past, the body and bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, the ontology and materiality of photography, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, and critical pedagogy in archaeology. Yannis is committed to an anthropologically-informed, critical archaeological engagement with past and present material culture, and to the inter-disciplinary nature of archaeological work. This position recognises the historically contingent nature of archaeology as a device of western modernity, as well as its potential to enable a critical and reflexive experiential encounter with the material world. He also believes on a politically committed archaeological and academic practice, devoted to social justice.

Critical mapping methodology as an analytical tool for the understanding of Greek archaeological production

The article attempts a critically mapping of the production process of Greek archaeological product , taking into account both the unexplored, so far, complexity of the process, along with the constantly important social value of the product. Our point of departure has been the challenging of current archaeological notion and practices, which we regard as scientifically suffocating and socially inadequate. In this direction, we attempted a visual panoramic synthesis of the archaeological production process through a critical prism constructed from the reflexivity of archaeological ethnography, the political engagement of militant research and the personal gaze of our autoethnographic approach. Drawing on macroscopic observations and partial comments that have derived from the map, we suggest that the archaeological product of Greece has been long detached from the process that produces it; a fact that justifies both the unchangeable features of the product, as well as the internal fragmentation of the process. We regard our interpretation as only a trigger for substantial dialogue concerning Greek archaeological reality and certainly not as an accomplished research outcome.

Working with huacos: Archaeological ceramics and relationships among worlds in the Peruvian North Coast

This article proposes a multitemporal approach to the study of archaeological ceramics in the Peruvian North Coast through archaeological ethnography. It allows us to create a new perspective of a past that seems to be continuously brought back in the ritual practices of curanderos (shamans), and in the daily life of other subjects that interact with what archaeologists call archaeological artifacts. In the rituals of curanderos and in the practice of huaqueo, where archaeological ceramics are known as huacos, it is possible to see how these vessels come to life, performing within a complex meshwork of relationships which extend over different worlds, as well as human and other-than-human participation. This discussion provokes the reevaluation of the relationships among archaeological heritage, archaeological material, and archaeological practice itself. It also shows how past and present are related in this specific Andean context.

Food as affirmative biopolitics at the border: liminality, eating practices, and migration in the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT Based on long term archaeological ethnography on the border island of Lesvos situated on Europe’s margins, this article explores the regimes of eating and the role of food practices in the refugee camp/processing centre of Moria. Starting from the double liminality of eating and border-crossing, it outlines and juxtaposes two regimes of corporeal life. The first is the biopolitical arena of official food provision as produced by the border apparatus and the logic of humanitarian governmentality. This regulates border-crosser’s time and daily routines and renders them ‘people of concern’, tress-passers or victimized individuals with no agency. The second is the affective, trans-corporeal, multi-sensorial field of cooking, eating, making kin, making community. It is produced through the agency of border-crossers themselves, when they take charge of their own eating. In doing so, they constitute eating in these liminal conditions as affirmative biopolitics, as the affirmative politics of life and hope.

Arqueologia e histórias de vida: uma experiência com os Tupinambá de Belmonte, BA

Este artigo trata sobre a pesquisa arqueológica na Terra Indígena Tupinambá de Belmonte, BA, localizada na costa nordeste do Brasil. A partir da descoberta de uma urna funerária, os Tupinambá propuseram o estudo de sítio arqueológico localizado em suas terras. Como arqueóloga, essa experiência possibilita a percepção dos sentidos que a urna funerária adquire na luta dos tupinambás pela retomada de suas terras ancestrais. Trata-se de uma etnografia arqueológica que busca contribuir com o conhecimento de outras narrativas sobre o passado das populações indígenas do Nordeste ao repensar o modo como as narrativas arqueológicas afetam a vida das populações contemporâneas e vice-versa.

A comparative study on the tibial morphology among several populations in ancient East Asia

Human skeletal morphology is a dynamic system affected by both physiological and environmental factors, due to the functional adaptation and remodeling responses of bones. To further explore the adaptation of bone to the environment and the consequent subsistence strategies determined by the diverse natural contexts in the Anthropocene, this study presents a comparative study on the tibiae of seven ancient populations located in different regions of East Asia. Through the analysis of the tibial shaft morphology, a comparative analysis between the populations and genders was conducted to evaluate the differences in external morphology and sexual division of labor. The cnemic indices of the tibial shaft were selected to quantify the external shape. Results showed that different populations had different tibial morphology. Among males, those of Jinggouzi had the flattest tibia while those of Changle had the widest tibia. Among the females, females of Hanben had the flattest tibia, whereas tibia from females of Shiqiao, Changle, and Yinxu were among the widest. The sexual dimorphism was relatively larger in Shiqiao and Jinggouzi and smaller in Tuchengzi and Changle. Through a combination of previous archaeological findings, historical records, and ethnography of the aboriginal Taiwanese, it is concluded that the terrain and ecological environments laid basis for varied subsistence strategies. In addition, the mobility and social labor division under a particular subsistence strategy further contributed to the adaptation of the lower limb morphology to its context. The comparative analysis provides further insight on habitual activities, terrestrial mobility patterns, and subsistence strategies of the populations, which lived in different environmental contexts during the Bronze Age and early Iron Age, thus demonstrating the diverse interactions between human populations and natural environment in the Anthropocene.

Navegando sobre lugares. Um ensaio da percepção do ambiente através de uma etnografía arqueológica da pesca

This text is the result of an archaeological ethnography conducted since 2010, in the fishing community of Barra do Joao Pedro, Rio Grande do Sul. Through an engaged participant observation, in which I tried out different fishing practices, I observed the importance of environment for the life of the community and for the construction of my narratives. From this, I propose in the present text, an immersion in the environment and in the perceptions that I experienced during the displacements made with the fishermen. For that, I used a detailed ethnographic narrative of the environment in its entanglement, highlighting the places, the stories told and the beings involved in the observed phenomena

Contemporary Gold Mining in Eastern Zimbabwe: Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Characteristics

This paper is based on the dataset that I collected during my doctoral research in Eastern Zimbabwe between 2015 and 2018. The dataset represents an investigation of pre-colonial and contemporary gold mining practices in this area and covers the period from AD 1300–2018 from an anthropological and archaeological perspective. The fieldwork conducted consists of archaeological excavations and surface collections that I carried out at three selected sites. Recovered material culture was then analysed using ethnographic analogies based on interviewing contemporary gold miners who were working near these sites. The dataset will be potentially useful to southern African archaeologists by offering them new direction on pre-colonial gold mining practices in a region where these have only been partially studied as appendages of iron production processes. The use of archaeological ethnography in this research also adds a multi- dimensional perspective in the interpretation of archaeological objects associated with pre-colonial gold mining practices in Eastern Zimbabwe. Funding statement: Financial support for this research project was received from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research through the Wadsworth Foundation African Doctoral Fellowship Programme (2015–2018).

Oral traditions and mounds, owls and movement at Poverty Point: An archaeological ethnography of multispecies embodiments and everyday life

Collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies call on researchers to recenter theory and practice on descendant peoples' lives and ways of knowing. Extending this project, this article takes story and dance as a site of theory, foregrounding Indigenous modes of embodiment in which bodily and sensory perspectives are cultivated through participation in more-than-human beings. Drawing on research with members of a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, it frames the large-scale earthworks at the Poverty Point site in Louisiana as representing a horned owl. This evokes stories about a people who lived in an owl-shaped village and who could move in particularly owlish ways. Critiquing ontological frameworks in which the sensory is universal and mind is removed from body and land, I argue that ancient peoples may have cultivated perspectival embodiments through the everyday activity of living together in the collective form of an owl. Moreover, as contemporary descendants return to Poverty Point, the land animates shared, multispecies sensory fields that enroll descendants into a longue durée of owlish encounters and entanglements, or what my hosts simply call “Owl's teachings.” Here, I call for an archaeology reimagined in the context of Native American and Indigenous studies, asking how mounds might animate resurgent possibilities rooted in (and routed through) deep Indigenous histories of return.

Mysticism, Enchantment and Charisma Reincarnated: Nineteenth-Century Islamic Talismans, Vernacularization and Heritage Values in Contemporary Asante

Condensed, concealed, inconspicuous material embodiments of mysticism, enchantment, and charisma, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans traveled the trans-Saharan caravan trade routes, circulating widely among the non-Muslim Asante, reflecting a tradition illustrative of the movement of people, objects, texts, ideas, and imaginations. Produced by migrant Muslim merchant-clerics and consumed by non-Muslim Asantes, they demonstrate the ways in which Islamic and non-Islamic traditions are inextricably intertwined. Deemed exceedingly efficacious, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans were conscripted for the Asante imperial project, chiefly, imperial expansion by combatting opposing social and political forces, namely, local insurgencies and British colonialism. Today, nineteenth-century Islamic talismans remain highly popular, continuing to circulate in local, regional, and national arenas as part of a contemporary living social tradition. Employing archaeological ethnography, this article examines how Muslims and non-Muslims mobilize nineteenth-century Islamic talismans in the present, critiquing Western Eurocentric heritage values that are oblivious to, and disregard Islam in Asante as a lived social and material praxis.

Community engagement through archaeological ethnography: learning in situ with a field school in Gonies Maleviziou, Crete

Community engagement through archaeological ethnography: learning in situ with a field school in Gonies Maleviziou, Crete