In recent years, archaeologists have used the terms hybrid and
hybridity with increasing frequency to describe and interpret forms of
material culture. Hybridity is a way of viewing culture and human action
that addresses the issue of power differentials between peoples and
cultures. This approach suggests that cultures are not discrete pure
entities but rather are continuously transforming and recombining. The
Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture discusses this concept and its
relationship to archaeological classification and the emergence of new
ethnic group identities. This collection of essays provides readers with
theoretical and concrete tools for investigating objects and
architecture with discernible multiple influences.
The twenty-one essays are organized into four parts: ceramic change in
colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; ethnicity and material culture
in pre-Hispanic and colonial Latin America; culture contact and
transformation in technological style; and materiality and identity. The
media examined include ceramics, stone and glass implements, textiles,
bone, architecture, and mortuary and bioarchaeological artifacts from
North, South, and Central America, Hawai'i, the Caribbean, Europe, and
Mesopotamia. Case studies include Bronze Age Britain, Iron Age and Roman
Europe, Uruk-era Turkey, African diasporic communities in the Caribbean,
pre-Spanish and Pueblo revolt era Southwest, Spanish colonial impacts in
the American Southeast, Central America, and the Andes, ethnographic
Amazonia, historic-era New England and the Plains, the Classic Maya,
nineteenth-century Hawai'i, and Upper Paleolithic Europe. The volume is
carefully detailed with more than forty maps and figures and over twenty
tables.
The work presented in The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture comes
from researchers whose questions and investigations recognized the role
of multiple influences on the people and material they study. Case
studies include experiments in bone working in middle Missouri; images
and social relationships in prehistoric and Roman Europe; technological
and material hybridity in colonial Peruvian textiles; ceramic change in
colonial Latin America and the Caribbean; and flaked glass tools from
the leprosarium at Kalawao, Moloka'i. The essays provide examples and
approaches that may serve as a guide for other researchers dealing with
similar issues.
