Scott Ortman is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, and SAR’s 2020 Weatherhead fellow.
For the past six years, Ortman has had the honor to partner with the Pueblo of Pojoaque in a joint investigation of ancestral sites in the Pojoaque area. Through this partnership, Ortman learned important lessons regarding the potential of archaeology for tribal communities; how archaeologists and tribal members can work together as co-investigators; how such partnerships improve and decolonize archaeological practice; and how the incorporation of traditional knowledge leads to better archaeology in both its humanistic and social scientific dimensions. In the process, Ortman also had the opportunity to engage with Native philosophy and to understand the issues facing the Pojoaque and other Native communities today. In this talk, he explores a key tension emerging from these experiences and discusses some of its counter-intuitive implications for archaeological practice. He illustrates these points using results from work at K’uuyemugeh and other ancestral sites in the Pojoaque area.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Alina R. Méndez is Assistant Professor, American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington, and SAR’s 2020 Mellon fellow.
The Bracero Program, a binational labor agreement between Mexico and the United States, placed approximately two million Mexican men (called braceros) in American farms between 1942 and 1964. In many agricultural regions across the West, braceros are now increasingly recognized as the Mexican “pioneers” of ethnic Mexican communities and celebrated for their contributions to local economies. One of these regions is California’s Imperial Valley, which borders the Mexican state of Baja California Norte. Arguing that “domestic” workers refused to labor in agriculture, Imperial Valley growers turned to braceros and their undocumented counterparts for cheap and flexible labor. If the labor of braceros and undocumented migrants came cheaply for Imperial Valley growers, however, this was largely because their communities subsidized the cost of such “cheap” labor. Méndez argues in her talk that the costs of maintaining a seasonal migrant labor force in the Imperial Valley remained hidden under the Bracero Program because braceros were employed in the United States during seasonal periods of labor need and expected to return to their families and communities in Mexico once they were no longer required in American fields.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Robert Caldwell is Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, SOWELA Technical Community College, and SAR’s 2020 Katrin H. Lamon fellow.
Maps of American Indian homelands, languages, and culture elements have profoundly shaped how scholars understand Indigenous peoples’ history. Because maps offer immediate pedagogical utility, they have been widely adopted in both popular and scholarly media.
Initially dependent on Native informants, Indigenous knowledge was eventually generalized, schematized, and ultimately refracted back onto Indian Country. The end product was a result of the transcontinental circulation of ideas regarding natural science, philology, and the place of American Indians in the world. Scholars assigned languages, ascribed territories, and delineated political and cultural areas, creating maps that have been used as a tool to remove agency and to relegate Indigenous peoples and spaces to a primordial past.
In this talk, Caldwell will discuss the two-hundred-year evolution of ethnological maps and offer a window into the world view of the mapmakers and their place within networks of power.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Alanna Warner-Smith is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Syracuse University and SAR’s 2020 Paloheimo fellow.
In her talk, Warner-Smith will be discussing the ways in which “slow science” and “slow archaeology” might be applied to bioarchaeology by looking at the Huntington Anatomical Collection and specifically focusing on the collection’s Irish immigrants, who lived, worked, and died in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking the skeleton as a record of lived experience, life-course approaches interpret evidence of health and activity across individuals’ entire lives. A “slow” approach also draws together multiple lines of evidence—skeletal, archival, and material—to disentangle the processes shaping bodies and lived experiences. Warner-Smith’s presentation will examine the ways in which a “slow bioarchaeology” informs the categories we use, the questions we raise, and the phenomena that form the focus of our studies.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Stephen Sullivan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and SAR’s 2020 Mellon fellow.
What does gentrification sound like? Previous scholarship tends to analyze the social and material processes of gentrification separately. Popular studies of urban sound, meanwhile, focus narrowly on noise complaints, without attention to the political and historical conditions they reflect. Sullivan’s dissertation research instead uses the concept of “soundscape” to offer a more integrated, on-the-ground account of gentrification and its discontents. During this talk, Sullivan will present preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork he conducted over the past year in a working-class, gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. Amid rapid demographic and social change, proposed changes to housing and land policy by elected officials, and heightened forms of policing under city leadership, sound in general and noise in particular have become sites of neighborhood contestation and dissent.
This event is part of the 2020 fall scholar colloquia series.
Each year, incoming resident scholars introduce their work to the SAR community through a presentation and Q&A. This year’s talks are hosted online and continue to be free and open to the public. Registration is required.