Abstract
A renewed adoption of relational perspectives by archaeologists working in eastern North America has created an opportunity to move beyond categorical approaches, those reliant on the top-down implementation of essentialist models or “types.” Instead, emerging approaches, concerned with highlighting the agential power of relationships between individuals, communities, and institutions, and, more generally, with simply moving beyond categories, are allowing archaeologists to move from the bottom-up, focusing instead on the relationships that underlie, and indeed constitute, social, political, and economic phenomena. In this paper, I synthesize recent archaeological work from across eastern North America in which archaeologists have productively moved beyond a reliance on categorical perspectives. I explicitly focus on the potential for relational perspectives to recalibrate our social and temporal referents in crafting archaeological narratives.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jennifer Birch, Victor Thompson, Steve Kowalewski, Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz, Brandon Ritchison, and Megan Conger for listening to my ideas and contributing valuable insight, whether knowingly or not. Thanks also to Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas for the invitation and opportunity to explore the topics discussed in this manuscript. I’d also like to thank Lewis Borck, John Hart, Shane Miller, Jill Neitzel, Alice Wright, and one anonymous reviewer for their exceptionally constructive comments on the first draft of this manuscript.
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Holland-Lulewicz, J. From Categories to Connections in the Archaeology of Eastern North America. J Archaeol Res 29, 537–579 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09154-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09154-w