T A G S A N T A F E

The 2024 meeting of the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) will convene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, North America’s oldest capital city. We are grateful to be hosted by the Indigenous nation of Picuris Pueblo, with all conference events taking place in the tribe’s hotel: Hotel Santa Fe.

TAG Theme: PLACE. Eclectic, theoretically-oriented contributions are welcome, but we particularly invite sessions, papers, and workshops that pose new questions about the archaeology of placemaking, native science, ecology, landscape, situated knowledge, multispecies analytics, critical cartographies, and anti-colonial localism.

Land Acknowledgment and a Special Invitation to Indigenous Participants

The city of Santa Fe is recognized as Oga Po’geh (White Shell Water Place) by Tesuque Pueblo and resides on the unceded traditional territories of the Tewa people. We acknowledge that Santa Fe is home to many other Indigenous peoples as well, including a plurality of Tiwa, Keresan, Zuni, and Hopi Pueblos, the Ndee and Diné, and various communities of detribalized native peoples locally known as Genizaros. We further acknowledge that Santa Fe is a significant space of cultural mixing as a result of Spanish and U.S. colonial occupations. The convergence of people of Amerindian, European, Asian, and African descent has created the complexity of Santa Fe’s contemporary cultural landscape. In acknowledging this history we center Indigenous self-determination as well as continued dialogue and storytelling around this place.

The TAG Santa Fe organizing committee is pleased to offer registration waivers for all Indigenous students and professionals interested in attending the conference. A special workshop is also being designed to share resources and advice regarding the development of Tribal Museums. If you are interested in taking part in these conversations, please contact one of the organizers (listed below) for more information.

Spaces are limited. Register now to ensure that you can join the TAG Santa Fe conversation!

Registration fees are $200 for faculty/general public, $100 for student/unwaged participants, and $0 for enrolled tribal members. All monies go directly to Picuris Pueblo and will be used to cover the costs of convening TAG at the tribe’s hotel. It will be a miracle if any funds remain once the conference is over, but those that do will be donated to the renovation of the Picuris Tribal Museum. Click on the appropriate category below for registration details:

• Faculty/General Public Registration ($200)

• Student/Unwaged Participant Registration ($100)

• Enrolled Tribal Members ($0)

Plenary Speakers

Mishuana Goeman, Professor of Indigenous Studies, University of Buffalo. Author of Settler Aesthetics: Visualizing the Spectacle of Originary Moments in the New World and Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations.

Sylvia Rodriguez, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of New Mexico. Author of Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place and Matachines Dance.

Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University. Author of Playing Indian, Indians in Unexpected Places, and American studies: A User’s Guide.

PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE

TUESDAY, MAY 21

5:00-6:30 PM: Plenary, “Place” (chaired by Lindsay Montgomery)

Welcome by Gov. Craig Quanchello of Picuris Pueblo
Plenary Speakers: Phil Deloria (Harvard University), Mishuana Goeman (SUNY Buffalo), Sylvia Rodriguez (University of New Mexico)

6:30-8:00 PM: Reception on the Hotel Santa Fe Patio

Special welcome dance by Picuris Pueblo
Complementary hors d’oeuvres and cash bar

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 22

MORNING SESSIONS (9:00 AM – 12:00 PM)

Session 1: Holding Uncertainty: Sketching the Unreliable Past

Chairs: Zoë Crossland (Columbia University), Andrew Roddick (McMaster University), and Kathryn Killackey (Killackey Illustration)
Presentations:
- “Sketchcavating: Working Through Context Visually” (Amanda Altoff, Columbia University)
- “Warping the Past: Weaving What We Know with What We Imagine” (Jennifer Byram, University of Arizona)
- “TBA” (Zoë Crossland, Columbia University)
- “TBA” (Andrew Roddick, McMaster University and Kathryn Killackey, Killackey Illustration)
- “‘A Pencil is then Best of Eyes’: Sketching, Seeing, and Science” (Caitlin Wichlacz, Arizona State University)
Session Abstract: What unexplored possibilities does sketching afford for archaeology? How might it reveal the unknowable, foreground absence, and make uncertainty visible? Sketching promotes a contingent, qualified, and unfinished approach; it is made on the way to somewhere else. Used creatively it can reaffirm and demonstrate the always-provisional nature of archaeological story-telling. Yet, how does the sketch stabilize some claims to fact while destabilizing others, and how is this folded into archaeological reconstructions? As AI-generated art emerges as a tool for archaeology, this becomes a pressing question, both because of the normative and unacknowledged processes by which AI fills in what is unknown, and because it loses touch with the process of sketching, where decisions leave marks of changing choices. We encourage papers that consider how the sketch might engage various publics, or make archaeological story-telling accessible while showing the complexities of what is unknown and unseen. How does the sketch figure into the ability to return to an image, after Lesley McFadyen, to make explicit and question knowledge through a process of redrawing? We hope that participants will go beyond the line of the sketch to embrace the role of play and “sketchiness” of archaeological practice and interpretation.

Session 2: Social Relations and the Multiplicities of Place

Chairs: Koji Lau-Ozawa (UCLA) and Eduard Fanthome (Stanford University)
Presentations:
- “Re-Arranging the Cultural Landscape: Recognizing Reservation Reconstruction” (Lauren Bridgeman, University of Arizona)
- “Playground as Home: Recreation as Extraction in the Eastern Sierras” (Eduard Fanthome, Stanford University)
- “Glittering and Glassy: The Cerrillos Hills as a Persistent Place in the Eastern Pueblo World” (Danielle Marie Huerta, UC Santa Cruz)
- “Ha:san, Saguaro, and Relationships to a Landscape at Gila River” (Koji Lau-Ozawa, UCLA)
- “Replanting Deep Roots: How Southern Mogollon Peoples Transferred the Spirit and Image of Sacred Cave-Shrines” (Scott Nicolay, UC Merced)
- “Ecologies of Cultural Heritage (Haoren Shi, Stanford University)
Session Abstract: Places are never singular in their relationships with people, ecologies, things, and history. They hold concurrent semiotic registers to multiple communities composed of humans and non-humans and the networks and relations they constitute – these multiplicities define them. Placemaking is multi-modal and shaped by agencies beyond social groups or factions within them working in concert or competing. Archaeologists have looked to concepts such as taskscapes and palimpsests to understand the layering of meanings in sites, with such frameworks often privileging diachronic interpretations, stratigraphic surfaces and sequences in chronologies that render placemaking as discreet socio-political projects. Building from these positions, the papers in this panel see places as emergent and interactive – simultaneous and synchronic creations that also constitute overlapping and occasionally contradictory meanings. Places are results of the interactions of multiple entities and networks that can be, and often are, spatially and temporally distributed. Rendering place in this way locates it in the narratives, practices, positionalities, historical memories and aspirations for the future of the agencies that it entangles. By framing place as multiple in its relationships to humans and non-humans, we seek to complicate the notion of sites and significance in archaeological interpretation and the concomitant responsibilities that such multiplicities hold for community engagement and accountability.

Session 3: Bioarchaeological Ethics in Practice

Chair: Sabrina C. Agarwal (UC Berkeley)
Presentations:
- “Placing the body and soul: Hindu cosmology in the ethics of historic anatomical collections from India” (Sabrina C. Agarwal, UC Berkeley)
- “Landscape and Storm Traces: The Bioarchaeology of the 1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2” (Meredith Ellis, Florida Atlantic University)
- “(Re)Placing the Bones: Critically Situating Casts in Osteology” (Lauren Hosek, UC Boulder)
- “TBA” (Alexandra McDougle, Columbia University)
- “Shifting Personhoods and Belonging: Mass Graves, Ossuaries, and Exhumations in Contemporary Urban San Juan, Puerto Rico” (José L. Marrero-Rosado, UC Berkeley)
- “TBA” (Alanna Louise Warner-Smith, National Museum of Natural History)
Session Abstract: Place is deeply implicated in bioarchaeological knowledge, as bioarchaeologists interpret the skeleton to better understand temporal and spatial experiences of environment and landscape. Bioarchaeologists consider the lived experiences of individuals and communities, contextualizing skeletal data within historical contexts, often narrating biographies within broader processes and landscapes. Moreover, theories of plasticity, local biology, embodiment, landscape, and identity are invoked as bioarchaeologists account for the ways bodies are both shaped for and shaped by the places in which they dwell, even as they also transform these landscapes. Engaging with “place” and “landscape” also aligns with recent calls to re-evaluate the ethical terrain of bioarchaeological practices. Echoing earlier developments in social biography, scholars highlight the importance of personhood, with interpretations that center on the humanity and life histories of people who have been made into curated specimens or anonymous data points. This requires rearticulating them within the places and time of their lifecourse, while also considering the role of transplanted places and places of return. While Indigenous scholars and activists have long fought for the return of ancestors to their places of home, curated collections of non-Indigenous ancestors have more recently come under increased scrutiny, as remains in storage drawers are increasingly recognized as “out of place,” with calls to return remains. “Return,” too, is a question of place and belonging, as practitioners grapple with where and with whom remains might (re)enter communities of care. In this session, we invite participants to consider the complexities of place, place-making, and belonging in bioarchaeological knowledge and practice. Participants might engage with the ways practitioners past and present ground individuals in their place of origin; deal with typological and colonial logics and legacies of putting people and things “in place”; consider shift and movement of place during life and death; and or the ways place and place-making is central to repatriation/rematriation and new understandings of stewardship.

Session 4: Community-Based Archaeology: Uniting Community Priorities with Archaeological Practice

Sponsored by the Ortiz Center, University of New Mexico
Chair: Michael Graves (University of New Mexico)
Presentations:
- “TBA” (Michael Adler, Southern Methodist University)
- “Reading Together: Indigenous Rock Art and Changing Woman’s Perpetual Story” (Jeremy Elliott, Abilene Christian University)
- “Theory as feeling: Theoretical and practical approaches to the concept of decolonial and collaborative archaeology” (Wilmer Falcon, Columbia University)
- “TBA” (Michael Graves, University of New Mexico)
- “Pecos Pueblo Repatriation Project” (Michael Hopper, Choctaw Nation, University of New Mexico)
- “Sacred Bones and Ancestral Ties: Archaeological Research with, by, and for the Descendants of Belén, NM” (Debra Martin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
- “TBA” (Kelton Sheridan, University of Texas, Austin)
Session Abstract: Archaeological scholarship now regularly incorporates community-based research. But examples of how and where archaeological research is developed to explicitly reflect community priorities are still relatively rare. Responsive archaeological research will connect to community priorities in both practice and theory. This session will include examples of integrative community-based research where goals and objectives clearly/fully relate to community needs and concern from the very start as projects are first imagined. Participants’ in this session will engage a range of communities and who have a commitment to archaeological research conducted with the explicit involvement of community members and organizations. This will include best practices where communities guide the direction and forms of research and where archaeologists actively unite communities’ interests throughout all stages of inquiry and activity. We expect to realize outcomes that improve the fit of archaeological practices to the communities in which we work. We invite joint presentations from community members and archaeologists.

Session 5: Technological Mediation of Digital Landscapes

Chair: Chester Liwosz (Independent Scholar)
Presentations:
- “Game Theory: Improving Database Integration Using Game Engine Software” (Chester Liwosz, Independent Scholar)
- “The Road Most Traveled: Developing Archaeological Data Literacy Open Educational Resources that Scale to Landscape Perspectives” (Paulina F. Przystupa, University of New Mexico)
- “TBA” (Kelsey Reese, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Session Abstract: TBA

Workshop 1: (Re)Placing Indigenous Priorities in Survey Methodology and Practice

Chairs: Kellam Throgmorton (Northern Arizona University) and Samantha Fladd (Washington State University)
Workshop Abstract: Archaeology has developed a common methodology for interpreting the material world through survey. Landscapes are brought into focus and the significance of places are defined through site documentation and assessment. Academics and land managers rely on archaeological survey to understand settlement patterns, landscape use, human-environmental interaction, regional histories, and threats to cultural resources. A “middle range epistemology” links place with meanings, interpretations, and values. Concurrently, ethnographers and Indigenous archaeologists have developed methods for documenting cultural landscapes and interpreting the significance of ancestral places. While these methodologies have not developed in isolation from one another, it is our perspective that they have developed parallel to each other. This workshop seeks to accomplish three things. First, it will interrogate the ontological structure of information obtained through archaeological survey–what assumptions about meaning, significance, and place-making permeate a practice that has become central to archaeology? Second, it will discuss an Indigenized archaeological survey. Can traditional archaeological survey be recalibrated to define places in ways that better serve the needs of contemporary descendant communities? Third, it will consider how the affordances of new, emerging technologies offer the potential for reconfiguring the priorities of and classifications used in archaeological survey.

AFTERNOON SESSIONS (1:00 PM – 5:00 PM)

Session 6: Artiplaces: From the Phenomenal to the Hyperreal

Chairs: Benjamin Alberti (Framingham State University) and Christopher Watts (University of Waterloo)
Presentations:
- “Ontological Arc of Native North American Bannerstones 6,000 BCE to the Present” (Anna Blume, Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY)
- “On the Consent of Stones: Sculpture and Place in the Ancient Maya World” (Claudia Brittenham, University of Chicago)
- “Marks in Place: Envisioning “Artiplaces” in Tool Groove Landscapes” (Mairead Doery, University of Arizona)
- “Footprints: Steps, Stepping, and the Signified in Mesoamerican Art” (Julia Guernsey, University of Texas, Austin)
- “Architecture as mimesis: geology, place, and the underworld” (Omur Harmansah, University of Illinois, Chicago)
- “Hungry Buildings of the Ancient Andes” (Hugo C. Ikehara-Tsukayama, Metropolitan Museum of Art)
- “Place, Paint, and Power: Paintings for the gods – Hueco Tanks as a Landscape Shrine” (Polly Schaafsma, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture)
- “Tracing the Tigris” (Jennifer Stager, John Hopkins University)
- “Beholding through Being: Understanding the Phenomenal Agency of Indigenous-Made Imagery” (Emily Van Alst, Washington State University)
- “The aura and the autoreferential in Great Lakes rock paintings” (Christopher Watts, University of Waterloo)
Session Abstract: Two children pressed hands and feet into soft travertine on the Tibetan plateau 170,000 years ago. To the extent we can recognize this as art, can we say – in the manner of Heidegger’s bridge – that it makes a place? By variously inventing, incorporating, or rejecting traditions, art can enable as much as curtail relationships between people and places. But do artworks – made of a place, not just in it – throw into relief certain qualities and experiences of place? Glimpsed through a topographic lens, how do notions of scale – from, for example, the locus of a rock art panel to a landscape of pictographic images – give rise to differing sensibilities (e.g., styles, aesthetics, spectatorship) around and between artworks? Likewise, how do various aftereffects – including repair and replacement, and in the case of rock art, nonhuman agencies like lichen growth and geomorphology – color our understandings of art and place? Additionally, as the vacant panels and plaster casts of the Acropolis Museum attest, might we also inquire of place’s inexorable grasp on artworks? And can it be said that artworks create their own places, serving as portals that transform the here-and-now, transcending the dimensionality of their very media? From the phenomenal to the hyperreal, this session invites participants to think about: (1) the relationships between art and the topographical or ecological plane (art as rooted in place); (2) how art and place gather and conflate disparate temporalities and materialities; (3) artworks that evoke and articulate with created, untethered spaces beyond the phenomenal world. When signifiers lack signifieds, surfaces exist absent depth, and imitations live without originals, what is actually there when we talk of art and place? Are these artworks more real than reality? What kind of “artiplaces” are these?

Session 7: TAG Takeover: Theorizing Indigenous Emergent Geographies

Chairs: Lindsay Montgomery (University of Toronto) and Nate Acebo (University of Connecticut)
Presentations:
- Nate Acebo (University of Connecticut)
- Dusti Bridges (Cornell University)
- Wade Campbell (Boston University)
- Sedonna A. Goeman-Shulsky (UCLA)
- Kalani Heinz (California State University, Northridge)
- Nicholas Laluk (UC Berkeley)
- Lindsay Montgomery (University of Toronto)
- Gerald Oetelaar (University of Calgary)
- Tsim D. Schneider (UC Santa Cruz)
- Jun Sunseri (UC Berkeley)
Session Abstract: In many ways, archaeologists have operated as thieves on Indigenous homelands, extracting ancestral belongings and borrowing theories that we do not own. As Zoe Todd has argued with regards to the ontological turn (a perennial topic at TAG), dominant intellectual structures “make it easy for those within the Euro-Western academy to advance and consume arguments that parallel discourses in Indigenous context without explicitly nodding to them” (2016: 8). Todd’s critique prompts archaeologists to consider how our theoretical practices may be working to maintain settler colonial systems which disempower and silence Native perspectives. Perhaps there’s something to be learned when these forms of boundary making are exposed and our disciplinary spaces are taken from us. This session positions TAG Santa Fe as one such site of occupation; an opportunity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars at the fringes and beyond archaeology to take over and imagine the potentials of placemaking through Indigenous knowledges. Contributions to this critical Indigenous Studies take-over session are invited to engage with the visionary toolkit of Indigenous futurity laid out by Laura Harjo (2019) in Spiral to the Stars. We are particularly interested in fostering critical dialogue around the theme of emergence geographies⸺concrete, ephemeral, metaphysical, and virtual practices which ensure the futures of Indigenous communities. Emergence geographies provide a lens through which we may tease out anti- and extra-colonial forms of placemaking within dominant institutions of settler colonialism. Our commitment to emergent geographies at TAG is equally pragmatic. Often tied to the informal spaces (e.g., laundromats, softball games and shopping malls) where Indigenous peoples come together to create transformative relations, this session embodies Krawec’s (2022:153) tenets of postcolonial kin-making in bringing together scholars across the spectrum of critical Indigenous studies and archaeology to build networks, supportive relations and foster a path for being better “relatives”. Contributions to this session will follow a salon-style format involving a combination of short presentations and micro-group discussions oriented around the theorization and application of Native science, Indigenous cartography, and practices of kin-making.

Session 8: Sanctity in Motion

Chairs: Rob Weiner (Dartmouth College) and Darryl Wilkinson (Dartmouth College)
Presentations:
- “The Altar in the Orchestra: modern performances in ancient Greek theaters as sanctified movement” (Julia L. Juhasz, University of Arizona)
- “Worldmaking and Anthro-Flows: Material-Mythic Info-Dynamics around the 1st-Millennium-BCE Gathering Center at Chavín de Huántar, Perú” (Miriam Kolar, School for Advanced Research)
- “Katsina Runners in Basketmaker II through Pueblo III Petroglyphs of the northwestern San Juan Basin” (Carol Patterson, Urraca Archaeology)
- “Entangling Surface and Subsurface Worlds: The movement of speleothems and creation of space at Punta Laguna, Yucatan, Mexico” (Nicholas Puente, UC Boulder)
- “Moving Across the Landscape at Chavin de Huantar (Peru)” (Silvana Rosenfeld, High Point University)
- “TBA” (Margaret Spivey-Faulkner, University of Alberta)
- “The Eight Sounds (八音 ba yin): Music, Materiality, and Movement in Early China” (Kirie Stromberg, Yale University)
- “Ancient Processions through Modern Voices: Digital Re-imaginings of Greek Sacred Landscape” (Natalie M. Susmann, Brandeis University)
- “TBA” (Rob Weiner, Dartmouth College)
- “TBA” (Darryl Wilkinson, Dartmouth College)
Session Abstract: It is difficult to think about place without also invoking the movements that occur to, from and within, places. The aim of this session is therefore to think about how movements, broadly conceived, constitute places and are, in turn, constituted by them. We are particularly interested in how movements—of human bodies, other-than-humans, clouds, waters, stars, and more—are vital in the making or maintenance of sacred places, and conversely, the ways in which certain movements are imbued with unique meanings through the places with which they are articulated. Participants are encouraged to engage with the theme of “sanctified movements” in diverse, innovative and eclectic ways. Some presenters might wish to address the long-distance motion of bodies across landscapes, such as in pilgrimages and other forms of sacred journeying. Other participants may wish to consider the more localized movements of bodies that occur in places like dance grounds, churches or plazas. We are also interested in the movement or relocation of religiously significant things or artifacts, especially in connection with people or bodies. Immobility, of course, is its own special kind of movement, and we see this topic as equally relevant to session. We do not expect presenters to rigidly confine themselves to any one of these suggested themes, and papers that cut across a range of approaches are also welcome.

Session 9: New Perspectives on Relationships with Plants and Animals

Sponsored by the Center for Indigenous Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Chairs: Katelyn J. Bishop (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Ripan S. Malhi, Jenny L. Davis, and Sarah E. Oas
Presentations:
- “Animals and Ayni: Examining Human-Nonhuman Exchange, Mutuality and Reciprocity in the Andes” (Aleksa K. Alice, University of British Columbia)
- “The Turn of the Worm: Reconsidering Insects in 19th Century Western Alaska” (Amanda Altoff, Columbia University)
- “Tusked Persons” (Isabel Beach, Boston University)
- “Decolonizing North American Zooarchaeology” (Katelyn J. Bishop, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jenny L. Davis)
- “Eleventh Century Aviculture in the Mimbres Valley, New Mexico: An Archaeology of the Human Experience Approach” (Sean G. Dolan, N3B Los Alamos, Christopher W. Schwartz, Patricia A. Gilman)
- “Vision and Blindness in Plant and Animal Archaeologies” (Sarah E. Oas, Archaeology Southwest)
- “Where are all the Bears?: Understanding the Relationships between People and Bears in the Ancient Southwest” (Kimberly Sheets, Washington State University)
Session Abstract: As a result of its Euro-American scholarly heritage, archaeology has definitionally centered people in its reconstructions of the past. Yet archaeologists have accepted, especially in the last half century, that people have always inhabited a more-than-human world, and that dichotomies like culture/nature, human/animal, mind/body, and subject/object are not inherently fundamental to or pervasive components of all worldviews, past or present. Instead, recent theoretical trends have emphasized relational ontologies between people, plants, animals, objects and other entities of the socionatural world; this push to think more expansively has emerged in large part thanks to Indigenous Science, engagement with Indigenous ontologies, and related endeavors. Two of the primary fields studying these relationships, zooarchaeology and paleoethnobotany, have come a long way from the taxa lists and specimen counts that historically were interpreted as descriptors of diet and subsistence. Many different types of relationships between people, plants, and animals have now been acknowledged. In the humanities and social sciences more broadly, intellectual projects like the Animal Turn, posthumanism, multi-species ethnography, and engagement with Indigenous perspectives and non-western ways of knowing have sought to de-center humans and reposition plants and animals as central to world making and place making. This session will present new ways of thinking about animals, plants, and their relationships with people, through the incorporation of new theoretical perspectives, new approaches, new angles, or new types of data that might push the bounds of traditional zooarchaeology, paleoethnobotany, or any other lens that can speak to relationships between people and entities of the more-than-human world. We especially encourage Indigenous participants, individuals working with Indigenous collaborators, or those using approaches from Indigenous Science.

Workshop 2: Tribal Museums: Opportunities and Challenges

Chair: Bruce Bernstein (San Ildefonso Tribal Historic Preservation Office)
Workshop Abstract: This workshop has been designed as a space for discussion of the opportunities and challenges for tribes that have or are planning to establish a tribal museum. Conceptually ambitious as well as bluntly pragmatic possibilities will be entertained, as will examples of successful tribal museums in the Southwest.

Tour of the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) and the School for Advanced Research (SAR)

Description: TBA
Logistics: TBA

HAPPY HOUR at the SCHOOL FOR ADVANCE RESEARCH (SAR) (5:15 PM – 6:30 PM)

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THURSDAY, MAY 23

MORNING SESSIONS (9:00 AM – 12:00 PM)

Session 10: Debating the Aesthetic and Poetics of Infrastructures

Sponsored by the University of Toronto
Chair: Edward Swenson (University of Toronto)
Presentations:
Session Abstract: Infrastructures in both pre-industrial and contemporary societies often form key sites of spectacle and contestation. Brian Larkin stresses the aesthetic, semiotic, and poetic properties of infrastructures as sources of fantasies and desires that often supersede their technical function. Think simply of the delight of one’s first subway ride, the wonder of walking across a suspension bridge, or the trepidation felt by the appearance of massive cooling towers visible from a car window. Fusing heightened consciousness with embodied experience, infrastructures can at once prove aesthetically satisfying as well as politically intimidating and oppressive. As Larkin notes (2013: 333): “They form us as subjects not just on a technopolitical level but also through this mobilization of affect and the senses of desire, pride, and frustrations which can be deeply political.” Spectacular infrastructure would include modern construction projects like the huge spires built to support television antennae (e.g. Toronto’s CN Tower) or cavernous airports constructed by “starchitects” as well as pre-modern equivalents like the Roman aqueduct at Pont de Guard, Inca agricultural terraces, or the great bath at Mohenjo Daro. We invite session participants to examine the varied and at times seamless interconnections of architecture, landscape, aesthetics, and infrastructures. Papers could focus on the cosmopolitical rationale driving building campaigns or the performative framework of construction projects—often highly visible, politically charged, and protracted affairs. Presenters might also explore how infrastructures have played a central role in the constitution of subjects not simply by prescribing movement or controlling access to resources but by wedding the aesthetics of place with religious cosmology, imagination, and sentiments of empowerment. Other topics might include the varied ontologies, materialities (ecologies), and agencies of infrastructures or how an investigation of the aesthetics of landscape, as theorized by Rancière and others, stands to improve archaeological approaches to the study of place making.

Session 11: Place, Gender, and Sexuality in Archaeology: Uncovering Locations of Identity

Chair: Anisa Côté (University of British Columbia)
Presentations:
- “TBA” (Benjamin Alberti, Framingham State College)
- “Discussant” (Brian Boyd, Columbia University)
- “Fired by Desire – Erotic Pottery in the Etruscan Afterlife: A Comparative Study of Erotic Attic and Moche Pottery” (Anisa Côté, University of British Columbia)
- “Dreams of the Earth Mother” (Severin Fowles, Barnard College)
- “TBA” (Nikem Ike, University of Toronto)
- “The Andean Longevity of the Lower Hurin Moiety: Nurture the People” (Mary Louise Stone, Independent Scholar)
Session Abstract: Where we are shapes who we are: a simple yet profound truth that underpins the intricate relationship between place and the formation of gender and sexuality norms. While a common topic of discussion in gender studies, a critical examination of the recursive relationship between location and the shaping of gender and sexuality is under-explored in archaeology. The intersection of gender and place is critical in conceptualizing ancient lived experiences, including social, political, economic, and ideological aspects of life. In an effort to broaden current historical understanding of ancient sexuality and gender norms, participants in this session are invited to question and challenge normative Western ideals of heterosexism and male dominance through various scales of analyses — from the local to the global, the rural to the urban, the sacred to the profane, and the domestic to the mortuary. Discussions of the local impacts of these cultural encounters, whether through trade, warfare, or colonialism, as well as the effects of displacement and migration, are welcome. Ultimately, this session advocates for a more inclusive and comprehensive archaeology reflecting upon the diversity of lived experiences in past societies. This approach is critical in broadening our current historical understanding of ancient sexuality and gender norms, allowing for a more equitable and nuanced interpretation of past cultures.

Session 12: “Indigenous Place Thought”: A Critical Indigenous Studies Intervention into Natural and Cultural Resource Management

Chairs: Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo) and Michael Spears (University of Arizona)
Presentations:
- “TBA” (Joseph Aguila, San Ildefonso Pueblo)
- “TBA” (Michael Spears, University of Arizona)
Session Abstract: This session critically engages with what Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts (2013:21) has called “Indigenous place-thought”; an epistemological approach “based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking, and that human and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts”. Taking up Watt’s concept of “place-thought”, we bring together approaches in critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous archaeology, and political ecology to explore the braided ways that Native people employ their epistemologies across natural and cultural fields of study and sectors of resource management. Throughout this forum-style panel, participants will discuss how Indigenous worldviews, experiences, and perspectives can contribute to a greater understanding of the ecological, cultural, and political complexities Native people face today. This discussion is oriented around three key questions: 1) How do Indigenous experiences of settler colonialism impact the ways we understand and address contestations over natural and cultural resources?, 2) What tensions and intersections exist between theoretical and methodological approaches within critical Indigenous Studies, archaeology, and political ecology?, and 3) How are these frameworks perceived and practiced in non-settler state contexts, as well as in settler contexts in which scholars fail to account Indigenous legal and political status within them? In addressing these questions, we attend to the unique conditions of Indigenous governance and sovereignty and the entangled contemporary relationship between self-determination, epistemology, ontology, and coloniality. By bringing together scholars, heritage professionals, and tribal employees from across various sectors to discuss these questions, we hope to generate new ethical and impactful research practices within archaeology that center the complexity of Indigenous place-thought and the interests of Indigenous communities.

Session 13: Situated Knowledge in a World of Archaeological Orthodoxy

Sponsored by Columbia University
Chairs: Jenny Ni (Columbia University), Brendon Murray (Columbia University), and Amanda Altoff (Columbia University)
Presentations:
- “Made from Mother Clay: Incorporating Indigenous Land-Based Ontologies into the Analysis of Archaeological Pottery” (Kathleen Barvick, University of Arizona)
- “Picurís Ethnogeography” (Sully Howard, Barnard College)
- “North of Rinconada” (Gerald Majer, Independent Scholar)
- ““Shot” By Places: The Power of Place in the Illinois Hopewell” (Andrew Martin, Principia College)
- “Situating Archaeological Survey within the Landscape: Photogrammetry, GIS, Experience between Moche and Virú, Peru” (Brendon Murray, Columbia University)
- “Remembering the Grandmothers: Archaeological Perspectives on Comanche Women through the Landscape” (Jenny Ni, Columbia University, and Jimmy Arterberry, Comanche Nation)
- “Think Like a Mountain: Convergence on Jicarita Peak” (Sara Reed, Barnard College)
- “When the Trace Becomes a Track: Survey, Surveillance, and the Art of Looking Back in the US-Mexico Borderlands” (Alaina Wibberly, University of Chicago)
Session Abstract: How do we strengthen our discipline by localizing it? As we continue to reject unilinear, universalizing models from an ‘orthodox archaeology,’ we might be becoming more reliant on non-excavational strands of evidence, such as oral archives, surveys, non-human networks and agencies. Mobilizing such situated knowledges requires careful contextual work. What unites us in our practice as we strive toward these situated, place-based practices that recognize particular contexts, peoples, and processes? How do we continue to communicate differences and similarities across times and places? What could a situated archaeology without excavation look like? Such considerations prod at the ongoing question of the heart of archaeology; the braiding of knowledge, and the communities – be they scholarly, ancestral, and public – we are accountable to. How does archaeology sit in this landscape? We invite participants to highlight the ways such situated knowledges and the contexts of places and communities have expanded and enriched their interpretations of archaeological material within their areas of focus. This session will consist of 10 minute presentations followed by discussion after every 3 presentations.

AFTERNOON SESSIONS (1:00 PM – 5:00 PM)

Session 14: Moving Place: Archaeologies of Mobility, Transit, and Emplacement

Sponsored by UC Berkeley
Chair: Rosemary Joyce (UC Berkeley)
Presentations:
- “Mobility vs. Permanence: A Discussion of Mobile Homes and Place” (Tanya Michelle Bertone, UC Berkeley, and Rosemary Joyce, UC Berkeley)
- “Bison, Picuris, and Scott County Pueblo: Movement and Belonging across Space” (Melanie Cootsona, UC Berkeley)
- “Discussant” (Ann E Danis, Cal Poly Pomona, California State University)
- “Cuisine in Motion” (Elizabeth Dresser-Kluchman, UC Berkeley)
- “Assembly through foodways in the Iberian Culture (5th – 1st century BCE): shared spaces, shared identity” (Alba Abad España, UC Berkeley, University of Alicante)
- “A Spatial Disruption? Colonial Archaeologists and the ”Ahali” (Peasants and Bedouins) in Palestine 1800-1950″ (Mazen Iwaisi, Queen’s University Belfast)
- “Placemaking through Islamic Silver Assemblages” (Sara Knutson, University of British Columbia)
- “Whose Home Is It Anyway? Place Making Across the Chinese Diaspora (Part II)” (Jocelyn Lee, Stanford University)
- “Whose Home Is It Anyway? Place Making Across the Chinese Diaspora (Part I)” (Veronica Peterson, Harvard University)
- “Comanche Territory and Territoriality” (Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, Texas State University)
- “Postmortem places in Medellin, Colombia” (Ciele Rosenberg, UC Berkeley)
- “Place, Placemaking, and Itineraries of the Body” (Jeffrey Allan Seckinger, UC Berkeley)
Session Abstract: Archaeology has been tied to an idea of placemaking that emerges as much from the practice of locating, naming, and exploring specific locales as from any culturally situated form of knowing and experiencing being in place. The archaeological site has historically been the “place” of the archaeologist. This session invites participants to do otherwise: to think with people who experience place as a gathering together, an assembly, rather than the commodifiable and alienated site that has too often served to separate belonging from history. Included here might be considerations of how we might attend to the ways people in the past traversed a variety of locales, creating identities and experiences that cannot be captured in a singular site; and ways that people have deliberately maintained the identity of places even as those places are shifted in coordinate space. In the interplay of mobility and locality, we seek to understand the emergence of experiences of connection and disconnection that might inform our changing discipline.

Session 15: Syncretism / Anti-Syncretism

Sponsored by Barnard College
Chairs: Severin Fowles (Barnard College) and Ellen Morris (Barnard College)
Presentations:
- “Syncretism and Ontological Essentialism” (Severin Fowles, Barnard College)
- “Beyond Syncretism: A case study of Sekhmet in Pharaonic Egypt” (Kechu Huang, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU)
- “Why Burn Your Nursling? On the Cultural Logics of Syncretism” (Ellen Morris, Barnard College)
- “Ancient Globalizations and Ontologies of Death as Heritage Practice in Aksum, Ethiopia (50-800 AD)” (Dil Singh Basanti, Northwestern University)
- “Ashes Beneath the Palace” (Aanmona Priyadarshini, Southern Methodist University)
- “Subcultural Ontologies: Using Actor Network Theory with AI” (Andrew Martin, Principia College)
- “lo puro de lo impuro: on reverse anthropologies & Native New Mexico, some mal-criado musings” (Gregorio Gonzalez, Comanche and Genizaro)
- “Syncretism in the Classic Period Northern Rio Grande Valley: The Musical Evidence” (Emily Brown, Aspen CRM Solutions)
- “Experience, Interests, and Identity at Estaca” (Scott Ortman, University of Colorado, Boulder)
- “Policing piety at the edge of empire: (anti-)syncretism and Los Hermanos Penitentes” (Emily Conlogue, Harvard University)
- “Discussion” (Hannah Chazin, Columbia University)
Session Abstract: “Syncretism” sounds outmoded, a relic of mid-twentieth-century anthropology and its presumption that original states of cultural purity were disrupted by imperialist projects, leaving subaltern groups on the edge of empire fragmented, mixed, and somehow illegitimate. Unlike other influential categories of early anthropology—notably animism and fetishism—there has been no sustained reimagining of syncretism as an analytical concept, even as the quickening pace of globalization brings exchange and mixture into ever-greater focus. In fact, the trend has moved in the opposite direction: toward ontological inquiries in which essentializing claims are made not just about the cultures of past communities but about their natures as well. Assumptions of ontological coherency/orthodoxy could be said to have quietly resuscitated the unfortunate presumptions of older syncretic studies. This session seeks to retheorize syncretism as a rejoinder to the ongoing problem of essentialization and also as an invitation to historically situated analysis that centers ontological transformation. We welcome papers that (1) examine how social worlds that were always already mixed mix again, (2) question what “mixture” or “synthesis” entails, and (3) remain alert to the countervailing forces that harden boundaries and struggle against synthesis (or what Stewart and Shaw refer to as “anti-syncretism”).

Session 16: Placing Relationally into Practice

Chairs: Emily Van Alst (Washington State University) and Samantha Fladd (Washington State University)
Presentations:
- “Re-Thinking the Language and Study and Storage of Native People’s Lives and Culture” (Bruce Bernstein, Pueblo de San Ildefonso)
- “Contexts of Care” (Samantha Fladd, Washington State University)
- “Reconnecting data to place and community in Lisjan territory, San Francisco Bay, California” (Lucy Gill, University of British Columbia)
- “Values, Virtues, and Voices” (Emily Jonsson, University of Arizona)
- “When is an Upright Stone Slab a Stela?” (Sarah Kurnick, UC Boulder)
- “Working Outside the Lines: Indigenizing Museum Collections Categories” (Elena Lompe, UC Boulder)
- “The Terms of the Debate” (K. Anne Pyburn, Indiana University)
- “”For my grandchildren”: Indigenizing Risk Assessment on the Kodiak Archipelago” (Sarah Simeonoff, UC Boulder)
- “Peoplehood: A Relational Framework for Political Identity” (Kellam Throgmorton, Northern Arizona University)
- “Recognizing Elk Images as Kin: Relationality as a Framework for Rock Art Interpretation” (Emily Van Alst, Washington State University)
Session Abstract: While archaeologists have long reveled in the delineation of classes or types in the past, the creation of archaeological categories often serves to distance communities from their own histories. This process has created morally neutral “pasts” that exist in isolation from the present and can be analyzed by archaeologists with little regard to descendants’ needs, perspectives, or beliefs. Despite the increasing recognition of this problem, the assumptions built into the very ways we approach the archaeological record remain largely unquestioned and continue to (re)produce data that lends itself to Western archaeological forms of analysis. In this session, we consider the theoretical implications of community-oriented archaeology for the very way we gather and classify data. In particular, we ask participants to engage with the Indigenous concept of relationality as presented by Indigenous scholars (e.g. Krawec 2022; Simpson 2017; Tynan 2021). Relationality speaks to the interconnectedness of the world and emphasizes practices of kinship and care work (Gupta et al. 2023). We ask, how might increased consideration of the interconnectedness of “data” often classified as discrete by archaeologists change our very understanding of archaeological “objects,” “materials,” and “cultures”? Can we envision an archaeology of care rather than categorization?

TAG PARTY (7:30 – 10:00 PM)

7:30-10:00 PM: TAG Party on the Hotel Santa Fe Patio

Music, food, celebration!
Complementary hors d’oeuvres and cash bar

* * *

FRIDAY, MAY 24: FIELD TRIPS

Picuris Pueblo (9:00 AM – 3:00 PM)

Organizer: Michael Adler (Southern Methodist University)
Description: A special opportunity to tour contemporary Picuris Pueblo and its surrounding ancestral sites, led by Michael Adler and members of the Picuris community. In addition to touring the ruins of the Classic Period village, participants will have an opportunity to tour the ongoing renovation of the Picuris Tribal Museum, taking part in a conversation regarding its potential. A special lunch, prepared by Picuris tribal members, will be offered at noon, so participants need only bring water. Meet at the entrance to Hotel Santa Fe for a 9 am departure in the Picuris van. The drive to Picuris takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes. We anticipate returning to the conference hotel at 3 pm or shortly thereafter.
Availability: Those wishing to join the tour are strongly encouraged to register in advance to reserve one of the 15 available seats in the Picuris van. Others are welcome to drive their own vehicles, meeting at the Picuris Pueblo Governor’s Office at 10:15 am. To sign up for the tour, click here.

La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site (9:00 – 11:30 AM)

Organizer: Rob Weiner (Dartmouth College)
Description: A morning self-guided tour of the extensive Ancestral Pueblo rock art at the La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Sites, coordinated by Rob Weiner. Meet at the main entrance of Hotel Santa Fe at 9:00 am, followed by a 25-minute drive to the site, a 1.5-hour tour, and a 25-minute drive back to the conference hotel.
Availability: Those wishing to join the tour are strongly encouraged to register in advance to reserve one of the 11 available seats in the TAG van. Others are welcome to drive their own vehicles, meeting at the La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs Parking Lot at 9:30 am. Click here to sign up for the tour.

Tsankawi Pueblo (12:30 – 5:00 PM)

Organizer: Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
Description: A special afternoon tour of the remarkable Ancestral Tewa village of Tsankawi and its surrounding landscape, led by Joseph (Woody) Aguilar of San Ildefonso Pueblo. The tour will involve a trail-based hike of moderate difficulty. Meet at the entrance to Hotel Santa Fe for a 12:30 pm departure, followed by an approximately 1-hour drive to the site, a 2.5-hour tour of Tsankawi, and a 1-hour return drive to the hotel.
Availability: Those wishing to join the tour are strongly encouraged to register in advance to reserve one of the 11 available seats in the TAG van. Others are welcome to drive their own vehicles, meeting at the Tsankawi Parking Lot at 1:30 pm. Click here to sign up for the tour.

About TAG

Building on its British history as a conference for experimental archaeological theory, TAG jumped the pond and established a North American foothold in 2008. Since then, it has been hosted yearly by a different U.S. or Canadian university, reinventing itself with each move. TAG 2024 enthusiastically breaks with this tradition, being hosted, for the first time, by an Indigenous nation—Picuris Pueblo—at their tribal hotel, with additional financial support provided by a range of partner institutions. For information about the history of North American TAG, click here. For information about Picuris Pueblo, click here.

Local Attractions

The conference will be based at Hotel Santa Fe, in the city’s historic Railyard District surrounded by a wide offering of restaurants, bars, and galleries, as well as the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market. The world-class museums, restaurants, performance venues, and shops of the Santa Fe Plaza are a short walk away. For those able to extend their stay, day trips from Santa Fe can to be easily taken to many extraordinary archaeological sites and other cultural attractions: e.g., Pecos National Historic Park, Bandelier National Monument, Petroglyph National Monument, Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, Acoma Pueblo, Taos Pueblo, and much more. For a list of Santa Fe museums, as well as archaeological and cultural destinations in the surrounding region, click here.

Travel and Accommodations

Owned and managed by Picuris Pueblo, Hotel Santa Fe is the only 100%-tribally-owned hotel in the city. We strongly encourage all those with the means of doing so to stay in Hotel Santa Fe during the conference, both to financially support our Picuris hosts and to benefit from the beautiful space they have created there. Hotel Santa Fe is offering an advance (until April 29) conference rate of $199 per night, more affordable than most hotels in downtown Santa Fe. For those on tight budgets, we are pleased to offer accommodation waivers for a limited number of participants in the conference’s sponsored sessions. Sponsored sessions have received financial support from a partner institution as a means of subsidizing low-income participation. For more information about Hotel Santa Fe and the possibility of accommodation waivers, click here.

We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our conference sponsors: