Chemical characterization reveals intra-source variation in obsidian from the Paredón source area in Puebla and Hidalgo, Mexico. Two chemical sub-sources of obsidian from Paredón are spatially discrete and cannot be distinguished by visual characteristics. To facilitate future investigations of the prehistoric exploitation of these sub-sources, an inter-laboratory comparison of elemental concentrations is presented based on neutron activation analysis and several XRF instruments.

Collaborative and Indigenous archaeologies call on researchers to recenter theory and practice on descendant peoples' lives and ways of knowing. Extending this project, this article takes story and dance as a site of theory, foregrounding Indigenous modes of embodiment in which bodily and sensory perspectives are cultivated through participation in more-than-human beings. Drawing on research with members of a small, Muskogee-identified community in the US South, it frames the large-scale earthworks at the Poverty Point site in Louisiana as representing a horned owl. This evokes stories about a people who lived in an owl-shaped village and who could move in particularly owlish ways. Critiquing ontological frameworks in which the sensory is universal and mind is removed from body and land, I argue that ancient peoples may have cultivated perspectival embodiments through the everyday activity of living together in the collective form of an owl. Moreover, as contemporary descendants return to Poverty Point, the land animates shared, multispecies sensory fields that enroll descendants into a longue durée of owlish encounters and entanglements, or what my hosts simply call “Owl's teachings.” Here, I call for an archaeology reimagined in the context of Native American and Indigenous studies, asking how mounds might animate resurgent possibilities rooted in (and routed through) deep Indigenous histories of return.

Material assemblages excavated from sites across eastern North America indicate the existence of ancient exchange networks that once spanned from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes and from the Atlantic to theOzarks. Yet identifying specific mechanisms of trade is more difficult. This article investigates oral traditions about esnesv-persons who acted as travelers, traders, diplomats, and acolytes-told in a Native American community in the US South whose members identify as of Muskogee (Creek) ancestry. Esnesv traveled great distances, enjoyed impunity in enemy territories, facilitated exchanges of knowledge and materials with important celestial qualities, and mediated peacemaking between peoples. Esnesv stories provide Indigenous perspectives on ancient exchange and diplomacy practices as a historically particular and archaeologically viable alternative to elite-controlled trade models. These stories describe trade goods that are simultaneously of earth and sky, furthering archaeological understandings of landscape and cosmology by rethinking difference, distance, and materiality. Esnesv threaded earthly fragments of the sky and Milky Way through peoples' relationships with foreign others, making exchange and peace within a world of roads connecting diverse, place-based lifeways. In doing so, they rebalanced the world, facilitating circulations of mobile landscapes and cosmic substances that generated new connectivities and ways of being. [oral traditions, exchange, decolonizing methodologies, Native American and Indigenous peoples, North America] RESUMEN Los ensamblajes materiales excavados de sitios a través de Norteamérica oriental indican la existencia de redes antiguas de intercambio que una vez se extendieron desde la costa del Golfo a los Grandes Lagos y desde el Atlántico a los Ozarks. Sin embargo, identificar mecanismos específicos de comercio es más difícil. Este artículo investiga tradiciones orales acerca de los esnesv -personas quienes actuaron como viajeros, comerciantes, diplomáticos y guardianes de la cultura-contadas en una comunidad indígena americana en el Sur de Estados Unidos cuyos miembros se identifican como de ascendencia Muskogee (Creek). Los esnesv viajaron grandes distancias, disfrutaron impunidad en territorios enemigos, facilitaron intercambios de conocimiento y materiales con cualidades celestiales importantes, y mediaron negociaciones de paz entre los pueblos. Las historias de los esnesv proveen perspectivas indígenas sobre prácticas de intercambio y diplomacia antiguas como una alternativa históricamente particular y arqueológicamente viable a modelos de comercio controlados por laélite. Estas historias describen el comercio de bienes que son simultáneamente de la tierra y del cielo, fomentando entendimientos arqueológicos del paisaje y la cosmología al repensar la diferencia, la distancia y la materialidad. Los esnesv enhilaron fragmentos terrenales del cielo y de la Vía Láctea a través de las relaciones de personas con otros de fuera, haciendo intercambios y la paz dentro de un ...

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This article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force relations exercised by Indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. I draw on research with members of a community in the U.S. South who claim Muskogee ancestry, visiting ancestral mound or earthwork and shellwork sites built over the past six thousand years. Wounded by ongoing colonial violence, these landscapes call out to descendants, drawing them into ancestral movements and relations of care. In these moments, ancestral sites refuse to be fixed within terminal chronological periods removed from a settled present, enrolling descendants into Indigenous space-times that dramatically exceed colonial timescales and temporalities. Drawing on this deep historical perspective, this article articulates a modest hope for the ways Indigenous landscapes, as agentive beings, animate decolonial possibilities for life in the ruins of colonial empires.