Amerind Free Online Lecture

Prehispanic Jewelry from the Sea with Elisa Villalpando, PhD

Saturday, May 13, 2023, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Since very ancient times, people have transformed all sort of objects into personal ornaments to denote differences in rank, gender, age, or simply to embellish themselves. These objects are not only carried in life, but often accompany individuals after death, or are offered by the mourners when performing funerary rituals.

Among the pre-Hispanic societies of Northwestern Mexico/Southwestern United States, most of these ornamental objects were made from pelecypods and gastropods collected from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean.

In this talk I will focus on the ornamental use of shell among the Early Agriculture Period communities of the Sonoran Desert (800 BC-50 AD) and how same species could be transformed over time to become more sophisticated ornaments, highlighting the differences in manufacturing techniques and styles that allow archaeologist to associate shell jewelry with different archaeological traditions. I will emphasize with some examples of shell jewelry from the Trincheras tradition of northwest Sonora, collected at its regional center in the middle Magdalena Valley: Cerro de Trincheras, in the Late Pre-hispanic Period (AD 1200-1450).

Elisa Villalpando was born in Baja California Sur, graduated as an archaeologist from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in 1984, and the Centro de Estudios Históricos de El Colegio de México (COLMEX) in 1992.

Has participated and directed archaeological projects for Instituto Nacional de Antroplogía e Historia (INAH) in Sonora since 1979, initially on hunter-gatherers and fishermen at San Esteban and Tiburón islands in the Gulf of California and the Sonoran coast, and later leading binational projects on Early Agriculture Period communities and trincheras´prehistoric settlements of the Sonoran Desert.

Is the author of numerous articles and some books on these topics, and has organized several symposiums and exhibits across the Arizona-Sonora border. She directed Cerro de Trincheras’ opening as a site for public visit in 2011, working with local community in public archaeology. She has produced museum scripts and curatorship for Cerro de Trincheras’ visitor’s center and for INAH’s Regional Museum of Sonora. As a result of the the experience of collaborating in the design of exhibits and the interpretive trail in the archaeological zone, she is interested in the accessibility and inclusion of all people to cultural heritage.

She is currently a member of Society for American Archaeology, Arizona Archaeological Historical Society, Amerind Museum Board of Directors, Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, and recently, Consejo de Museos y Exposiciones INAH. Has been awarded international recognition for her work in the diffusion of archaeological knowledge of northwestern Mexico on both sides of the border.

To register for this free online event, visit: https://bit.ly/Amerindonline04292023Villalpando

Amerind Free Online Lecture

Contextualizing “Old” Museum Collections: The Case of Obsidian “Mirrors” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian with Maria M. Martinez, PhD and Michael Brandl, PhD

Saturday, August 6, 2022, 11:00 am – Arizona Time

Sponsored by Desert Diamond Casinos

Anthropological museum collections are an important resource for academic and community-centered research. However, many museum collections have minimal or even lack contextual information. This study exhibits some of the protocols for consulting Indigenous heritage in museum settings and overcomes the challenges related to collections-based research. Recent studies of rectangular polished obsidian items found within museum collections have indicated that these objects were made by Mexican Indigenous artisans during the colonial period for European consumption. Nev­ertheless, much of this research was not well-grounded within the discipline of anthro­pology and therefore did not fully address the potential cultures or communities that manufactured these items and the Indigenous and colonial intersections under which they were produced and consumed. We interweave archaeological analytical techniques, provenance and techno-morphological analysis, including experimental archaeology with pre-Columbian archaeological studies, Mesoamerican art and iconogra­phy, and historical sources to identify the culture(s) that manufactured rectangular obsidian tablets in the context of Indigenous and colonial entanglements in Mexico. This study in collections-based research contributes to the restoration of ancestral intel­lectual knowledge and labor to Indigenous peoples that were erased through the process of coloniality, including museum practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Maria M. Martinez is associate curator of collections and exhibits at the Amerind Foundation, Inc. She served as a program special­ist for research and collections access at the Smithsonian Institu­tion, National Museum of the American Indian, for five years. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013. She continues her research in Maya archae­ology as a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and with lithic provenance studies at the Austrian Archaeologi­cal Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests are collections-based community-centered research, Indigenous stewardship of museum collections, Mesoamerican archaeology, lithic raw material provenance studies (chert and obsidian), eco­nomic archaeology (mechanisms of exchange, distribution, and consumption), household archaeology, craft production, and con­temporary and ancient Maya ritual practices.

Michael Brandl is researcher and coordinator of Archaeological Sciences at the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the University of Vienna, Austria. He received his PhD at the Institute of Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology of the University of Vienna. He developed the “Multi-Layered Chert Sourcing Approach” for lithic provenance studies combining petrographic analyses and geochemistry. His main research interests are lithic raw material and economic analyses.

This online program is free, but space is limited. To register, visit: https://bit.ly/AmerindOnline080622