Papers by Lisa Overholtzer
Americae, 2021
This paper explores human engagement with ceramic figurines in household ritual practice at Postc... more This paper explores human engagement with ceramic figurines in household ritual practice at Postclassic Xaltocan (Mexico). Drawing on the ontological turn, figurines are understood to be other-than-human agential entities and momentary orderings of sacred and vital energy that come into being in the context of relational ritual practice. Considering their depositional context, appearance, and three-dimensional morphology—pierced pendants, standing figures with mouths open as if mid-speech, or kneeling figures holding offering bowls—helps us understand the nature of their embodied engagement with humans. Based on ethnohistoric documents and archaeological excavation data, I argue that flat-backed Aztec figurines were lively, efficacious agents and essential parts of household ritual assemblages, helping to ensure household health and success, especially in stressful contexts such as times of war. I take an inclusive approach to gender in the household and consider the frequencies and excavation context of figurine men and women of the flat-backed type and explore interconnections between human men’s and women’s work and household concerns. This research also provides a window into shifts in household anxieties and the lived experience of men and women within the era’s rapidly changing social, political, and economic contexts. The Middle Postclassic emerges as the period defined by the most fear, uncertainty, and instability for commoner men and women at Xaltocan, more so than the Late Postclassic period, of the Aztec rule, which is often assumed to be the era of greatest household hardship.
American Antiquity, 2021
This article quantifies the rate at which women archaeologists are present and retained in univer... more This article quantifies the rate at which women archaeologists are present and retained in university departments. Drawing on publicly available data, we examine gender representation in (1) doctorates earned between 2002-2003 and 2016-2017; (2) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant applications and awards at the doctoral to senior levels between 2003 and 2017; (3) tenure-stream faculty at Canadian universities in 2019; and (4) placement of Canadian PhDs in the United States. These data demonstrate that women today represent two-thirds of all Canadian doctorates in archaeology, but only one-third of Canadian tenure-stream faculty, although not all archaeologists choose an academic career. In the last 15 years, women with Canadian PhDs have been hired into tenure-track positions in Canada at rates statistically lower than men, but at higher rates in the United States. Women apply for SSHRC archaeology grants in equal proportion to their presence, but men are awarded at a slightly higher rate. We end by discussing the possible reasons for this gendered attrition, including a "chilly climate"-that is, subtle practices that stereotype, exclude, and devalue women, as well as inhospitable working environments, particularly for primary caregivers. We warn that the current COVID-19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate these existing inequalities.
Journal of Archaeological Research , 2019
This paper applies the interdisciplinary approaches of commodity chain, commodity circuit, and c... more This paper applies the interdisciplinary approaches of commodity chain, commodity circuit, and commodity network analyses—common in sociology, anthropology, and geography—to cotton cloth in the Aztec economy to demonstrate how these techniques can enrich archaeological understandings of ancient economies. Commodity chain analysis draws attention to social and economic dependencies that link people and processes along a production sequence and across wide geographic areas. Commodity circuits and commodity networks highlight the bundling of goods and knowledge in nonlinear and multidirectional flows, the relationships that link participants through these flows, and the flexible meanings and values of goods for participants. By applying these approaches to the archaeological study of cotton cloth in the Aztec economy, we show how they provide a holistic framework for studying goods that bridges the microscale (household) and macroscale (world system).
In the wake of Native North American activism and moves to decolonize archaeology, some academics... more In the wake of Native North American activism and moves to decolonize archaeology, some academics have begun to avoid displaying human remains. Though recent World Archaeological Congress accords detail a consent process for ethical display, some journals, museums, and individual scholars have blanket policies covering even those remains whose descendants favour display. This article examines one context affected by these policies: the central Mexican town of Xaltocan. Here, Indigenous residents advocate for archaeological study and exhibition of ancient human remains, yet they have been criticised and censored by North American audiences. We consider two factors behind their desire to display the dead as part of efforts to reclaim Indigenous identities: long-standing Mesoamerican relationships with the dead and the materiality and symbolic capital of bones. We argue that an academic reluctance to display any human remains is problematic – even if it is a well-intentioned acknowledgement of respect for their sensitive nature – because it imposes the wishes of one Indigenous group on another, and may thereby lead to the unwitting perpetuation of colonial practice. We suggest that decolonizing archaeology may sometimes necessitate allowing the exhibition of skeletal remains; ethnographic research in individual communities is needed to ensure respect for descendant perspectives.
In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical documents and monuments as... more In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical documents and monuments as evidence for social memory and the selective writing, rewriting, and silencing of history for instrumental purposes. However, for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons, less consideration has been given to such powerful uses of the past in the past by commoners in domestic contexts. In this article,
we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deployment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine-grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land—
entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes. 
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Papers by Lisa Overholtzer
we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deployment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine-grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land—
entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes.