Identity Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Identity

372 Pages·2016·3.8 MB·English

by  Amundsen-Meyer L.

Identity Crisis:
Archaeological
Perspectives on Social
Identity

Proceedings of the 42nd (2010) Annual
Chacmool Archaeology Conference,
University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta

Edited by Lindsay Amundsen-Meyer, Nicole
Engel and Sean Pickering
Published by:
Chacmool Archaeological Association
University of Calgary
2011
We would like to thank all the contributors for allowing us to include their research in this
volume and for their patience as we moved through the editing process. Thanks are also owed to
the members of the 2009 Chacmool Conference Committee, without whom this examination of
archaeological aspects of identity would not have occurred. We would also like to thank Dr.
Gerry Oetelaar for his continued help and guidance throughout all stages of the publication
process. Finally, thanks to the Chacmool Archaeological Association for continuing to sponsor
both the annual Chacmool Conference and the publication of each year‘s proceedings.
Table of Contents

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Lindsay M. Amundsen-Meyer

Paradox and Praxis in the Archaeology of Identity ...................................................................... 11
Andrew Gardner

Adorning Identities: Brooches as Social Strategy in Early Medieval Europe .............................. 27
Heather M. Flowers

Health and Social Status in early Anglo-Saxon England: A Consideration of Cemetery Evidence
from Edix Hill (Cambridgeshire) .................................................................................................. 37
Julia A. Gamble

Age and Gender Identities and Social Differentiation in the Central European Copper Age ...... 49
Jan Turek

Funerary Rites as a Means of Land Appropriation ....................................................................... 62
Lieve Donellan

Lifting the Veil: Identity and Dress of Brides on Athenian Vases ............................................... 74
Renee M. Gondek

Practical Identities: On the Relationship between Iconography and Group Identity.................... 86
Christopher M. Roberts

The Costume of Crisis Reinforcing Local Identity in Later Etruscan Art .................................... 96
Eoin M. O'Donaghue

Kashrut and Shechita – The Relationship Between Dietary Practices and Ritual Slaughtering of
Animals on Jewish Identity ......................................................................................................... 106
Haskel J. Greenfield and Ram Bouchnick

"It Is Very Difficult to Know People...": Cuisine and Identity in Mycenaean Greece ............... 121
Julia Hruby

―I Discard, Therefore I Am‖: Identity and Leave-Taking of Possessions .................................. 132
Monica L. Smith

Does Ethnicity Matter in Colonial Relations? The Case of South Italy ..................................... 143
Edward Herring

Theatres of Memory: Second Life and the Cyber Identity of the Middle Ages. ........................ 157
Megan Meredith-Lobay
Identity Negotiation during Tiwanaku State Collapse ................................................................ 167
Nicola Sharatt

The Archaeology of Death on the Shore of Lake Nicaragua ...................................................... 178
Sacha Wilke, Geoffrey McCafferty and Brett Watson

A Different Kind of Afterlife: The Cultural Biography of Headstones ...................................... 189
Katherine Cook

The King is Dead, Long Live the King: Mimesis and Identity in the Cultural Projects of the New
Order at Tikal .............................................................................................................................. 199
Joshua Englehardt

Hybrid Objects, Hybrid Social Identities: Style and Social Structure in the Late Horizon Andes
..................................................................................................................................................... 211
Cathy Lynne Costin

Sex, Drugs and Rock Gods: Examining Nicaraguan Stone Sculptures ...................................... 226
Sacha Wilke

Ceramic Analysis from the Site of La Delicias, Nicaragua ........................................................ 235
Lorelei Platz

Bling and Things: Ornamentation and Identity in Pacific Nicaragua ......................................... 243
Geoffrey McCafferty and Sharisse McCafferty

Who was that Masked Man: Iconography and Identity in the Middle Classic Maya Ballgame 253
Priscilla Mollard

Continuity, Cultural Dynamics, and Alcohol: The Reinterpretation of Identity through Chicha in
the Andes .................................................................................................................................... 263
Guy S. Duke

Harmony and Conflict: The Balseria Feast and Central Panamanian Chiefly Societies ............ 273
Mackenzie K. Jessome

Distinguishing Social Identity in the Archaeological Record: The Toyah/Tejas Social Field ... 285
John Arnn

Architecture and Social Identity: Observances from Two Historic Sites in Calgary ................. 299
Dale Boland

Social Memory and Identity as Reflected in the Reuse of a Residential Group at the Maya Site of
San Bartolo.................................................................................................................................. 311
Diane Davies
―Everything Necessary for a Comfortable Existence‖: Colonialism and Identity in the Petit Nord,
Newfoundland ............................................................................................................................. 321
Jennifer Jones

A People for All Seasons: Expressions of Inuit Identity over the past 500 Years in Southern
Labrador ...................................................................................................................................... 332
Lisa K. Rankin

A Theory of Complexity, Archaeological Data, and the Ouroboros Problem: A Critical Analysis
of Archaeological Practice on the Northern Plateau, British Columbia ..................................... 341
Lucille E. Harris and Michael Wazenreid

An Anthropology of Third-Wave Mayanism: Emic Rationales Behind New Age
(Mis)appropriations of Ancient Maya Calendrics and Symbology ............................................ 352
Marc Blainey
Identiy Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Identity
Introduction

Lindsay M. Amundsen-Meyer
Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, Alberta,
T2N 1N4

The Conference

Sponsored and organized by the Chacmool Undergraduate Association in the Department of
Archaeology at the University of Calgary, the Chacmool Conference is one of the largest annual
archaeology conferences in Canada. The papers included in this volume were drawn from close
to 120 papers presented at the 43rd Annual Chacmool Conference in November 2009. This
Conference was especially meaningful, as the mayor proclaimed the week prior to the
Conference ―Archaeology Week‖ in the City of Calgary, an event which drew together the
Chacmool Archaeological Association, Graduate Archaeology Student‘s Association and
Archaeological Society of Alberta to promote public awareness of archaeology. Entitled
―Identity Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Identity‖, the conference was meant to
attract papers that would contribute to a dialogue on and the study of social identity in the
archaeological record. The response to the call for papers was extensive with topics ranging from
technological and culinary practices as markers of identity to material and spatial aspects of
households and communities as signs of identity, In fact, identity followed individuals to the
grave as indicated by the treatment and disposition of human remains in mortuary contexts.
Furthermore, participants in the conference came from the Circumpolar North to Latin America
and from Western Canada to, Greece and Rome.

Identity Crisis

As a component of daily practice, identity itself is a characteristic of both individuals and groups.
The construction and maintenance of identity in the past may not have been straightforward;
many of our social categories such as race, gender, and social status likely did not hold the same
meaning to the people of the past (Meskell 2001; Wynne-Jones and Croucher 2007). Theorizing
social identity in archaeology thus warrants recognition that, although our subjects are dead and
long-buried, they were once people with lives, friends, goals and senses of self. We should,
therefore, study past identities through the reconstruction of daily practices and social
interactions to gain a greater understanding of the people of the past.

Michel Foucault has argued that identity is a form of social construction which people impose on
themselves and others (Foucault 1994). The contributions to this volume highlight the fact that
there are, indeed, multiple, layered and plural identities, created through both self-definition and
the perceptions of others. Consequently, the concepts and definitions of identity discussed in this
volume are dynamic, changing with history, environment and socio-political relations
(Martindale 2009; Wynne-Jones and Croucher 2007). For archaeologists who are forced to
examine a static record, it is important to recognize the dynamic nature of social identity and to
adopt a more active view of the archaeological record in which the construction of identity
occurs as a fluid and continuous process (Meskell 2001).
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Identiy Crisis: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Identity

As archaeologists, we often operate under the assumption that artifacts and material remains
have a direct relationship with social identity (Casella and Fowler 2005). Although material
remains do serve as a good indication of social identity in many cases, this explicitly material
focus is not necessarily justified. As the contributors to this volume show, the examination of
material culture is only one of many ways in which social identity can be accessed in the
archaeological record. Because identity is the product of social processes, the study of the daily
lives of groups and individuals through material remains, iconography, communal events, dietary
practices or burial customs can lead to a greater understanding of the mechanisms of identity
construction and maintenance within a given culture (McGuire and Wurst 2002). As the
contributions in this volume illustrate, the question of identity in archaeology is intriguing given
the different approaches to identity construction and the different responses of individuals to
social stimuli in past societies. The articles included in this volume explore the study of identity
in a variety of contexts, ask different questions and offer new interpretations of the
archaeological record.

The Contributions

The papers in this volume represent only a small subset of a wide range of papers from different
regions and countries presented at the 2009 Chacmool Conference. The diverse array papers
presented here should include something for everyone, from new approaches or ways of looking
at identity in the archaeological record to new perspectives on social identity. Archaeologists in
the Old and New Worlds are faced with different problems, materials and social contexts in their
approaches to the study of identity. For organizational purposes, we have opted to present the
papers dealing with the Old World first, followed by those dealing with New World culture
areas, but we encourage our readers to explore the innovative approaches used in other parts of
the world which may, in fact, have applicability in their own culture area. However, the volume
begins with a paper by Andrew Gardner, the keynote speaker at the 2009 Conference, who
presents a discussion of theoretical approaches and considerations in the archaeological study of
identity. He discusses the fluid and multiple nature of social identity, which make it difficult to
discover this ever-changing concept in the archaeological record. Identities, Gardner suggests,
have the power to both divide and unite present and past populations. He nevertheless suggests
that social identity can and should be studied archaeologically and presents a number of
theoretical and methodological techniques for doing so. Gardner‘s encouragement to take up the
study of social identity provides a nice lead into the remaining papers of the volume.

Old World Approaches to Identity
The symbolic world of a group or individual is often expressed in funerary contexts, making
mortuary analysis a good venue for identity research. At death, people are immortalized as they
were. Grave goods, as personal belongings and/or items of socio-symbolic significance, give an
indication of who a person was in life and may also create a metaphorical link between the living
and the dead. Similarly, skeletal analysis can provide an indication of the life of a particular
individual while the ritual accorded at death may reflect perceptions of the individual as well as
larger societal worldviews (Aranda et al. 2009; Bruck 2004; Mengoni 2010; Weiss-Krejci 2004).
Four papers in this volume explore social identity through funerary contexts in the Old World.
Heather Flowers uses grave goods, specifically brooches, to infer social identity during the
decline of the Roman Empire. To Flowers, the brooches served both functional and symbolic
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purposes. Their iconography reveals the social, political and religious status of individuals as
well as their kinship and personal identity. Through her analysis, Flowers also shows how
material culture can be used as a social strategy to create, maintain and visualize identity. Julia
Gamble‘s paper provides an example of how bio-archaeology can be used to study social
identity. Through the combined analysis of grave goods and the health status of associated
individuals, Gamble is able to relate sex and/or gender differences to societal positions. Like
Gamble, Jan Turek examines how age and gender reflect social identities. Turek, however, takes
a different approach looking at body orientation rather than skeletal remains per se. Turek shows
that, although there were set rules for the orientation of male and female burials in the European
Copper Age, some elderly individuals cross this line suggesting that gendered social identities
sometimes change with age. Lieve Donnellan also uses funerary ritual to infer group, rather than
individual, identity. Donnellan shows how sixth century B.C. tumuli in the Greek colony of
Istros combine Greek and indigenous customs. He shows the fallacy of using rigid ethnic
dichotomies arguing that local/indigenous customs can be appropriated and new identities
created in colonial situations, a theme common in many papers in this volume.

Analysis of artistic representations is commonly used to identify and interpret social identity in
the archaeological record, because this iconography reflects the materialized worldview of the
respective society. Both material culture and the associated iconography make cultural
statements about their respective societies, specifically through social memory and related
praxis. In this way, social identity often becomes associated with specific types of iconography,
which can then be used to study these identities. Although artistic representations are often seen
as markers of political order and of elite social identity, they can also be used to explore how
common people mapped and understood their own social world. Further, artistic representations
and specialized artifacts are often used to enhance communication, and thus serve as a valuable
avenue from which to access social identity (Chenoweth 2009; Lucero 2010; Moore 2010; Perez
2005). In this volume, three papers use artistic representations to access social identity in the
past. Gondek examines how the clothing of brides represented on Ancient Greek vessels reflects
the woman‘s new identity as a wife and shows how these artistic depictions differ from written
descriptions of the ceremony itself. Her work cautions us against using only a single line of
evidence to infer changes in social identity. Roberts‘ paper builds on this situational, flexible and
context dependent nature of identity and explores how a flexible social identity can be studied
through the static material record. Roberts‘ paper serves as a cautionary tale, identifying a
number of potential pitfalls in connecting iconography and identity. Moving away from
ceramics, Eoin O‘Donaghue uses Etruscan art on sarcophagi, engraved mirrors and tombs to
study local identity in the region. Like Gondek, O‘Donaghue specifically looks at types of dress.
By studying the period of Roman expansion in Etruria, O‘Donaghue shows how iconography can
be used to strengthen local identity during a time of conflict.

The production, distribution, and consumption of food are governed by ideological and cultural
rules that can serve as metaphors for social and world orders. These activities are related to
material practices that are accessible archaeologically and are linked to the construction,
maintenance and change in social identities. Our choices in the preparation and consumption of
foods reflect the division of labour (and by extension gendered identities) and social status, and,
by extension, the role of the group or individual within a larger society (Balme and Bowdler
2006; Lyons 2007; White 2005). Haskel Greenfield and Ram Bouchnik examine the relationship
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between religious identity and foodways, specifically studying Jewish dietary practices and food
production techniques. Zooarchaeological evidence from a number of sites in Israel is compared
with Jewish texts at both the household and community level. The authors identify multiple
levels of social identity where Jewish laws allow the construction of group identity while
household and community level dietary practices show the smaller scale process of self-
identification. Julia Hruby uses ceramic, paleobotanical and textual evidence to show that
Mycenean elites in the Aegean Bronze Age utilized different types of cuisine than the general
populace. Communal events often involved the conspicuous consumption of food and, as such,
provided the perfect setting for elites to negotiate and maintain their social power. Hruby is not
only able to examine differential class identities through dietary practices but also to show the
unique identity of the Palace of Nestor based on regional differentiation in ceramic styles.
Hruby‘s paper highlights that not only the types of food consumed but also the rituals and
material culture associated with its production and consumption can be used to infer the social
identity of the consumer.

Humans not only express their worldview through the production, distribution and consumption
of material culture including foods but also through the systematic discard these items (Hall
2001). Therefore, discard, or the leave-taking of possessions, can be a statement of identity just
as much as the production, circulation and use of these goods. In her paper therefore, Monica
Smith studies identity through the placement of sacred and secular trash in Asia and India. She
concludes that not only the trash, but the handling of trash as an event, can be a component of
identity formation and communication. Discarded items, therefore, should not simply be seen as
―out of sight out of mind‖; they should be an object of study.

Reading through the contributions to this volume, it becomes clear that identity is not static or
singular; it is multiple, politicized and contested, created through a series of competing material
and ideological processes. The archaeological emphasis on cultural and political boundaries and
a static material record can sometimes cause us to overlook the many layers of contested
identities. However, culture contact is not simply an encounter: it is a dialogical relationship
which creates and negotiates new forms of cultural identity (Bernardini 2005; Curtoni et al.
2003; Martindale 2009). Several papers in this volume show (e.g., Cathy Costin, Diane Davies,
Nicola Sharatt and Lieve Donellan, among others) that times of conquest and instability are often
times when identities are contested, re-negotiated and re-created. At the beginning of this
volume, Andrew Gardner‘s paper showed us the theoretical basis for this paradoxical nature of
identity and demonstrated how archaeology has been able to bring to light changing identities in
the later Roman Empire. Similarly, Edward Herring‘s paper examines changes in local power
relations in the colonial period of South Italy. The author illustrates how a basic division between
colonial and indigenous identities can be reformulated in ethnic terms. Herring‘s work
demonstrates shifting attitudes towards ethnicity that have occurred in anthropology and how a
middle ground approach can lead to valuable conclusions.

Although the articles thus far have discussed past identities, identity creation does not only occur
in the past. Popular culture brings ideas from the past and interpretations of history into the
present, causing identities to be re-lived and re-negotiated. Furthermore, in our modern
technological world, the internet serves as a vehicle to spread these ideas and as a tool of
ethnographic study and identity creation (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2002; Silverman 2002). Along
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