TY - JOUR
T1 - Agency in a postmold? Physicality and the archaeology of culture-making
AU - Pauketat, Timothy R.
AU - Alt, Susan M.
N1 - Funding Information:
Support for the excavations summarized in this paper were provided by the National Science Foundation (SBR-9305404, SBR-9996169, and BCS-0219308), the National Geographic Society (Grants 6319-98, 7313-02), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant 5625), the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society, and the University of Illinois. We are grateful to Catherine Cameron, Marcia-Anne Dobres, Thomas Emerson, Matthew Johnson, John Robb, James Skibo, and an anonymous reviewer for their critical reading of an earlier version of this paper. For their stimulating thoughts regarding that earlier version, we are also grateful to Kira Blaisdell-Sloan, Rosemary Joyce, Jeanne Lopiparo, and the other participants of a UC-Berkeley conference on practice theory in archaeology. All remaining shortcomings are our own.
PY - 2005/9
Y1 - 2005/9
N2 - Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales. Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American mid-continent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historical-processual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis.
AB - Architecture embodies human agency in all of its dimensions and effective scales. Specifically, the wooden posts of Mississippian peoples in the American mid-continent were simultaneously spatial, material, and corporeal dimensions of the process of cultural construction and contestation. Our reconsideration of the lowly postmold is based on the principle of physicality that, in turn, alters the ways in which we pose research questions and interpret archaeological data. A historical-processual methodology involves three procedural fundamentals: identifying practical variability, comparing genealogies of practices, and tacking between lines of evidence at multiple scales of analysis.
KW - Agency
KW - Architecture
KW - Mississippian
KW - Practice
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U2 - 10.1007/s10816-005-6929-9
DO - 10.1007/s10816-005-6929-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:24144461332
SN - 1072-5369
VL - 12
SP - 213
EP - 237
JO - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
JF - Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory
IS - 3
ER -