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 20 registration waivers for Indigenous students and professionals interested in attending the conference. Special workshops are also being designed to share resources and advice regarding the development of (1) Tribal Museums and (2) Tribal Historic Preservation Offices. If you are interested in taking part in these conversations, please contact one of the organizers (listed below) for more information.
Deadline for Proposing a Session or Workshop:
March 22, 2024
(Extended) Deadline for Proposing a Contributed Paper:
April 29, 2024
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.
JOIN A SESSION
For session abstracts and more information on how to organize a session or contribute a paper, click here.
- “Sanctity in Motion” (chaired by Robert Weiner and Darryl Wilkinson)
- “Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism” (chaired by Severin Fowles and Ellen Morris)
- “Moving Place: Archaeologies of Mobility, Transit, and Emplacement” (chaired by Rosemary A. Joyce)
- “Artiplaces: From the Phenomenal to the Hyperreal” (chaired by Benjamin Alberti and Christopher Watts)
- “Debating the Aesthetics and Poetics of Infrastructures” (chaired by Ed Swenson)
- “TAG Takeover: Theorizing Indigenous Emergent Geographies” (chaired by Lindsay Montgomery and Nate Acebo)
- “Bioarchaeological Ethics in Practice: Returning and Emplacing” (chaired by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Alanna Warner)
- “New Theoretical Perspectives on Relationships with the More-than-Human World” (chaired by Katelyn J. Bishop, Ripan S. Malhi, Jenny L. Davis, and Sarah E. Oas)
- “Situated Knowledge in a World of Archaeological Orthodoxy” (chaired by Jenny Ni, Brendon Murray, and Amanda Altoff)
- “Community-based Archaeology: Uniting Community Priorities with Archaeological Practice” (chaired by Michael Graves)
- “Holding Uncertainty: Sketching the Unreliable Past” (chaired by Zoë Crossland, Andrew Roddick, and Kathryn Killackey)
- “Place, Gender, and Sexuality in Archaeology: Uncovering Locations of Identity” (chaired by Anisa Côté)
- “Social Relations and the Multiplicities of Place” (chaired by Koji Lau-Ozawa and Eduard Fanthome)
- “Placing Relationality into Practice” (chaired by Emily Van Alst and Samantha Fladd)
- “‘Indigenous Place Thought’: A Critical Indigenous Studies Intervention into Natural and Cultural Resource Management” (chaired by Joseph Aguilar and Michael Spears)
REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE
Conference registration opens on February 22. 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)
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.
TAG Santa Fe will commence with a plenary session from 5-6:30 pm on Tuesday, May 21, followed by a reception. Organized sessions with 15- or 20-minute presentations and ample time for discussion, as well as roundtable workshops, will convene throughout the day on Wednesday and Thursday, May 22-24. Three field trips to local sites in the Rio Grande Valley are being arranged for Friday, May 24: (1) a full-day tour of Picuris Pueblo, led by tribal members (80 min. north of Santa Fe); (2) a morning tour of La Cieneguilla Petroglyphs (25 min. southwest of Santa Fe), and (3) an afternoon tour of Tsankawi Pueblo (60 min. northeast of Santa Fe), led by Joseph Aguilar of San Ildefonso Pueblo. Details to come. For information on how to propose a paper to an existing session, click here.
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.
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.
2024 TAG Organizing Committee
If you would like to discuss how you or your institution might get involved in TAG Santa Fe, feel free to reach out to any member of the TAG 2024 Organizing Committee:
Darryl Wilkinson (Dartmouth College)
Rob Weiner (Dartmouth College)
Lindsay Montgomery (U of Toronto)
Severin Fowles (Barnard, Columbia U)
Tamara Bray (Wayne State U)
Benjamin Alberti (Framingham State U)
Woody Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
Michael Adler (Southern Methodist U)
T A G S A N T A F E 