La prochaine conférence de la Société des Américanistes aura lieu le mercredi 20 mars 2019, à 17 h (merci de bien prendre note de l’horaire), dans la salle de cinéma du musée du quai Branly :

Rosemary Joyce

Professeur, UC Berkeley

 

Painted Pottery From Honduras: Object Itineraries and Lives

Research on Honduras’Ulua and Las Vegas Polychrome traditions, and related Salua Polychrome of El Salvador and Galo Polychrome of the Nicoya area, demonstrates the utility of practice-based frameworks employing concepts of technological style, and communities and constellations of practice. While culture history, with its equivalences of a people, a material culture, and a language, worked as a preliminary step to clarify histories in areas like Mesoamerica, in Central America an astonishing diversity of things were made within much smaller territories.

Reconstructing the chaine operatoire, lives of individual objects, and itineraries across time and space of painted pots that provide the main database for archaeology in Central America shows that the level of action in pottery production and use was the town and local communities of practice. This leads to a reconsideration of culture-historical concepts of language-based ethnic groups originally employed by Americanist archaeologists to organize knowledge of this region.