Session 1: Sanctity in Motion

Sponsored by Dartmouth College

Chairs: Robert Weiner (Robert.S.Weiner@dartmouth.edu) and Darryl Wilkinson (Darryl.A.Wilkinson@dartmouth.edu)

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 2: Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism

Sponsored by Barnard College

Chairs: Severin Fowles (sfowles@barnard.edu) and El Morris (emorris@barnard.edu)

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 3: Moving Place: Archaeologies of Mobility, Transit, and Emplacement

Sponsored by U.C. Berkeley

Chair: Rosemary A. Joyce (rajoyce@berkeley.edu)

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 4: Artiplaces: From the Phenomenal to the Hyperreal

Chairs: Benjamin Alberti (balberti@framingham.edu) and Christopher Watts (c3watts@uwaterloo.ca)

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 5: Debating the Aesthetics and Poetics of Infrastructures

Sponsored by the University of Toronto

Chair: Ed Swenson (edward.swenson@utoronto.ca)

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 6: TAG Takeover: Theorizing Indigenous Emergent Geographies 

Chairs: Lindsay Montgomery (lindsay.montgomery@utoronto.ca) and Nate Acebo (nathan.acebo@uconn.edu)

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. 

Harjo, Laura. 2019. Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity. Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies. University of Arizona Press.

Krawec, Patty. 2022. Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Augsburg Fortress Publishers.

Todd, Zoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.

Session 7: Bioarchaeological Ethics in Practice: Returning and Emplacing

Sponsored by U.C. Berkeley

Chairs: Sabrina C. Agarwal (agarwal@berkeley.edu) and Alanna Warner (alwarner@syr.edu)

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 8: New Perspectives on Relationships with Plants and Animals

Sponsored by the Center for Indigenous Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Chairs: Katelyn J. Bishop (kjbishop@illinois.edu), Ripan S. Malhi, Jenny L. Davis, and Sarah E. Oas

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.

Session 9: Situated Knowledge in a World of Archaeological Orthodoxy

Sponsored by Columbia University

Chairs: Jenny Ni (jn2512@columbia.edu), Brendon Connor Murray (bcm2153@columbia.edu), and Amanda Althoff (eaa2167@columbia.edu)

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.

Session 10: Community-based Archaeology: Uniting Community Priorities with Archaeological Practice

Sponsored by the Ortiz Center, University of New Mexico

Chair: Michael Graves (mwgraves@unm.edu)

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 11: Holding Uncertainty: Sketching the Unreliable Past

Chairs: Zoë Crossland (zc2149@columbia.edu), Andrew Roddick (roddick@mcmaster.ca), and Kathryn Killackey (kjkillackey@gmail.com)

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

Chair: Anisa Côté (anisac@student.ubc.ca)

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 13: Social Relations and the Multiplicities of Place 

Chairs: Koji Lau-Ozawa (khozawa2@g.ucla.edu) and Eduard Fantomen (fanthome@stanford.edu)

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 14: Placing Relationality into Practice

Chairs: Emily Van Alst (emily.vanalst@wsu.edu) and Samantha Fladd (samantha.fladd@wsu.edu)

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?

Session 15: “Indigenous Place Thought”: A Critical Indigenous Studies Intervention into Natural and Cultural Resource Management

Chairs: Joseph Aguilar (aguilarj@sas.upenn.edu) and Michael Spears (mspears6@arizona.edu)

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. 

Watts, Vanessa. 2013. Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency amongst Humans and Non-humans. DIES: Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 2 (1): 20-34.

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

Chairs: Kellam Throgmorton (kellam.throgmorton@nau.edu) and Samantha Fladd (samantha.fladd@wsu.edu)

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.

Workshop 2: Tribal Museums: Opportunities and Challenges

Chair: Bruce Bernstein (bernsteinbruce@gmail.com)

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. Conceptual as well as strategic funding possibilities will be reviewed, as will examples of successful tribal museums in the Southwest.