"Peopling" the Americas Animate Landscapes and the Archaeology of the Western Hemisphere (original) (raw)

2024, Archaeology in a Living Landscape: Envisioning Nonhuman Persons in the Indigenous Americas

How can we, as social scientists raised in the West, trained in the Western tradition, and working within a Western scientific framework, engage with other ways of living in, relating to, and understanding the world? The core beliefs that help us understand the nature of reality and our place in the universe are both durable and enduring. As an archaeologist (Woodfill) and an art historian (Henderson), it has become abundantly clear to us that the implicit biases of our own worldviews have skewed and limited our scholarship of the Indigenous Americas, particularly as it relates to discussions of ritual, belief, sacred landscape, myth, and myriad other terms heavy with Western perspectives and expectations. We have grown up in an anthropocentric world in which humans are considered unique and in which persons-conscious beings capable of choice and action-are always human, situated outside of and taxonomically separable from other life forms. This basic assumption starkly contrasts with those of many other modern and ancient populations, where materials, places, forces, events, and things we might categorize as inert have the power of action and agency, and where humans are only one category of persons believed to populate, act upon, and interact within the cosmos. In this volume, we strive to bring attention to the ways in which our Western anthropocentrism detracts from our ability to meaningfully address fundamental aspects of life and society for preconquest and Indigenous Americans. Archaeology and art history, particularly when framed as anthropological endeavors, explicitly focus on the understanding of people's behaviors through their use of things. It is rather alarming that so few studies acknowledge and highlight the fact that, in many of these cultures, things can be persons (e.g.,