Articles and Book Chapters by Lewis Borck
Vapaki: Ancestral O’Odham Platform Mounds of the Sonoran Desert, 2023
Obviously, this perthat the Salado phenomenon was a social move-spective is not new in archaeolog... more Obviously, this perthat the Salado phenomenon was a social move-spective is not new in archaeology, but as arment aimed at returning power to all commu-chaeologists continue to pull apart the seams nity members in the Hohokam world and led to that stitch together archaeological sequences, what archaeologists have problematically called an acknowledgment is usually made that social the "Hohokam Collapse:' In this chapter, we ex-and political change are not simply a byproduct plain why terms like collapse indicate an under-of environmental change. lying bias and fail to capture intentionality and In one of his more profound points, evoluthe achieved positive outcomes of social and tionary ecologist Christopher Hawkes stated, political decentralization. We also discuss why "there is nothing in North American ecology, we think current archaeological explanations by itself, to compel either Iroquois institutions, may be useful for explaining local changes, say, or the Constitution of the United States" but are inadequate for explaining the dramatic (1954:163; see also Fowles 2018). Thus, historitransition in cultural practices at the end of cal contexts-as important as social and envithe Classic Period for the Hohokam world at ronmental factors-help us situate explanations large (i.e., Tucson and Phoenix Basins, Safford for change inside of the temporal dynamics that valley, Sulfur Springs valley, Papaguerfa, por-lead up to societal hinge points (e.g., Borek and tions of northern Chihuahua and Sonora, and Simpson 2017; Dueppen 2012; Fowles 2010b; other regions that show material culture indica-Glowacki 2015; Ortman 2012; Wallace 2014) tive of Hohokam presence [see, for example, where political and material trajectories can Garcia's and Bernard's discussions in Colwell-potentially transform in one of a multitude of Chanthaphonh 2006]). Finally, we discuss how culturally informed directions. The historical this new understanding of Salado as a social context for change is also intertwined with envimovement is supported by published Akimel ronmental and social factors in a giant spaghetti and Tohono O'Odham oral histories. knot of dialectic (e.g., Hegel 2010), syntheses, Archaeologically and historically, renewed and dialogic (e.g., Bakhtin 2010) coexistences. concern favors explaining, instead of describ-In this chapter, we examine why and how ing, hinge points of rapid change in society (for these societal hinge points, particularly when the Southwest,' see Arakawa 2012; Borek 2018; combined with environmental inflections, are 201
Power from Below in Ancient Societies: The Dynamics of Political Complexity in the Archaeological Record, Nov 2021
One of the great tragedies of global archaeology is that the discipline was started by Europeans ... more One of the great tragedies of global archaeology is that the discipline was started by Europeans entrenched in the ideological detritus of attempts to author legitimacy for their expanding empires through their assumed cultural connections with the so-called Classical societies in and around the Mediterranean. Because of this, we continue to explain movements away from centralization and aggregation of power as anomalies, or collapses, or natural reactions to environmental change. Using social movement theories within a framework of contentious politics, we start to answer one of archaeology's big what-ifs: What if "collapses" were the result of widespread, intentional actions to create change? To do so, we investigate how local communities reacted to the spread of a new ideology that archaeologists call the Salado Phenomenon. We address how tensions stretching across political, social, and religious spheres created a pattern observed in the archaeological record that has previously been interpreted as a religious cult. We discuss how this pattern relates to acts of resistance and why these acts demonstrate that the Salado Phenomenon represents the remains of a spatially and culturally dispersed religious social movement that burst across the southern Southwest, aimed at contesting the centralization of power by regional elites and councils during the Hohokam Classic period (AD 1100/1200-1450). Using fissures in the ideo-political landscape of the Greater Southwest to contextualize this movement, we argue this religious social movement formed, and was successful, because it contested and eventually dispersed, in the mid 14th to mid 15th centuries, the centralization of power that happened during previous ideo-political developments in the southern Southwest. Collapses, we argue, should always be investigated first from a position that assumes that communities rejected power aggregation.
Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 2020
A common problem when classifying archaeological objects is a potential cultural bias of the pers... more A common problem when classifying archaeological objects is a potential cultural bias of the person deciding on the classification system. These are existing concerns within archaeology and anthropology and have previously been discussed as an emic/etic divide, “folk” classifications, or objective versus subjective approaches. But who gets to decide what is objective is often a subjective endeavour. To examine if and how cultural perceptions bias classification systems, we use methods from the field of cultural domain analysis to quantify differences in perception of ceramic sherds between different groups of people, specifically archaeologists and Indigenous and non-Indigenous potters. For this study, we asked participants to arrange a set of 30 archaeological sherds on a canvas, then interviewed them following each sorting exercise. A geosocial analysis of the arrangements in this pilot study suggests that there are substantial differences in the criteria by which the sherds are sorted between the groups. In particular, the arrangements by the Indigenous potters showed a greater diversity in the selection of underlying attributes. Understanding our different perceptions towards the material we use to construct history is the first step towards approaching what feminists have called a strong objectivity and thus a less fraught and more culturally inclusive discipline.
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2019
Archaeology is a process for, at minimum, constructing history from the material record. The deci... more Archaeology is a process for, at minimum, constructing history from the material record. The decisions about what to use to create that history is unavoidably political. This political act primarily serves to construct and enforce the power of the state, although it can be used to contest it. Prefiguration, emerging from anarchist theory and parallel social movements, can be understood not simply as a radical practice, but also as an understanding of how history is created. Thus, it can be used to explain how history is constructed from past and contemporary archaeological decisions, as well as what sociopolitical organizations that future history will naturalize.
Forum Kritische Archaeologie, 2020
Life Beyond the Boundaries: Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest, 2018
In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune (Trice 2014), while discussing how modern Native A... more In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune (Trice 2014), while discussing how modern Native Americans have become culturally invisible in the United States, indigenous rapper Frank Waln stated “we’re a people with a past, not of the past.” This is a process he calls “symbolic annihilation.” In many ways, the Gallina invert Waln’s sentence. They were a people of the past but without a past. By purposely removing objects that referenced their place-based past, they removed their recent history to focus more fully on the period of the distant past (Basketmaker II) that was their atavistic ideal. They simultaneously removed themselves from history while wrapping themselves in their own version of the past. For this chapter, then, to reverse the standard archaeological gaze and view the Gallina as active producers and not just recipients of history, I used geosocial networks and architectural patterning to explore potential patterns in the archaeological record through the lens of social movements. The case study was conducted at the community level. The community data were synthesized in a bottom-up, diachronic, and cross-regional inquiry into the use of space and use of markers of place within and between Gallina communities. Thus, the Gallina are viewed as part of a historical continuum instead of merely within a spatially restricted culture area. From this perspective, they become much more than a culturally impoverished group that was pushed into poor resource areas at the margins of more demographically dense, culturally rich groups. Instead, when the non-local ceramics found in some Gallina households are interpreted as remnants of largely forgotten inscribed memory, they become a people with varied histories who chose to reject the northern Southwest’s changing social landscape by systematically removing their place-based connections to that history and then reworking their political and ideological world.
By taking a diachronic and network perspective, the Gallina become a people who chose their way in their world. Specifically, they decided to step out of a cultural and ideological trajectory diametrically opposed to their ideas on how life should be organized. Once socially and historically situated, the Gallina highlands look more like a place of refuge for people who were rebelling against political and religious changes in the northern Southwest than an area populated by simple folk unable to keep pace with their rapidly changing neighbors. The Gallina region suddenly becomes a much more complicated place—a diverse collection of people dedicated to creating a new community at the edges of their previous world, one with clear material connections to antecedent regional groups (see Simpson 2016) but with new architectural and artifactual forms (i.e., tri-notched axes and pointed-bottom vessels). However, they are not a hybrid group like the colonial resistors Homi K. Bhabha (1994) was describing when he redefined hybridity. Instead, as a product of their atavistic movement, they become hybrids through time. By appropriating the past for their own intentions, they become rebels in their present—pioneers of a future history.
Stewards of the Forest: Papers in Honor of J. Michael Bremer and Anne R. Baldwin, 2022
Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology
"To play with a tired phrase, pots are not people, but they are choices." Borck and Mills 2017:30... more "To play with a tired phrase, pots are not people, but they are choices." Borck and Mills 2017:30
In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, pp. 29–43. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
KIVA: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History , 2017
Archaeological research on the Gallina (AD 1100–1300) inhabitants of the region west of the Rio C... more Archaeological research on the Gallina (AD 1100–1300) inhabitants of the region west of the Rio Chama and centered on the Llaves valley has focused on constructing a culture history and examining functional characteristics of artifacts and architecture. Limited research has attempted to understand who the residents of the Gallina heartland were. In this article, using new findings and historical contexts, we argue that the Gallina people had a complicated identity forged around resistance and a deep connection to their past. To better understand them we need to move past previous binary categories used to describe them and perceive them not as isolated or connected, aggressors or victims, traditionalists or innovators, but as an intersectional mix of these axes of identity. Moreover, the process-oriented discussion of ethnogenesis can be problematic. Instead it might be best to think of Gallina social identity as one of being, instead of becoming, because for them identity was not a process, it was a position, although one variably shifting along intersecting axes of identity—it was not static. Just as critically, becoming is a category of hierarchical power in some Indigenous communities in the Southwest.
The SAA Archaeological Record, 2017
On the cover: Ceramic sherds, trowels, folding rule, and theory. "Anarchaeology" by Lewis Borck c... more On the cover: Ceramic sherds, trowels, folding rule, and theory. "Anarchaeology" by Lewis Borck can be reused under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2018
The theory of anarchism primarily concerns the
organization of society in a way that fosters egal... more The theory of anarchism primarily concerns the
organization of society in a way that fosters egal-
itarian or equitable forms of association and coop-
eration and resists all forms of domination. An
anarchist perspective involves an awareness of,
and critique of, how power is implemented
through social relations, whether positively as in
collaborative acts of mutual aid to common goals
or negatively as in assertions of authoritarian
power contrary to the interests of the community
as a whole. As a theory concerning power and
social relations, archaeologists apply anarchism
for analyses of past societies, to interpret and
evaluate forms of egalitarian or hierarchical rela-
tions, modes of domination or resistance, and
expressions of control or autonomy. Moreover, it
is not just for considering the past, but the theory
can be applied to contemporary social arrange-
ments concerning archaeology in multiple ways:
how archaeologists organize themselves for
research teams and field crews, involve local or
descendant communities, or relate to the various
publics concerning heritage. Anarchism has had
an increasing influence upon archaeology in
recent years, just as the theory has influenced
other disciplines throughout the social sciences
and humanities.
This dissertation uses a relational approach and a contentious politics framework to examine the ... more This dissertation uses a relational approach and a contentious politics framework to examine the archaeological record. Methodologically, it merges spatial and social network analyses to promote a geosocial archaeology. The articles create a counter-narrative to environmentally and economically focused investigations that can fail to explain how and why societies in the Southwest often reorganize horizontally. The first article uses geosocial networks, which I argue represent memory maps, to reveal that people in the Gallina region during A.D. 1100 ̶ 1300 employed the socially important, and sophisticated, act of forgetting. A community level, settlement pattern analysis demonstrates similarities between the arrangement of Gallina and Basketmaker-era settlements. These historically situated settlement structures, combined with acts of forgetting, were used by Gallina region residents to institute and maintain a horizontally organized social movement that was likely aimed at rejecting the hierarchical social changes in the Four Corners region. The second article proposes that as ideologically charged material goods are consumed, fissures within past ideological landscapes are exposed and that these fissures can reveal acts of resistance in the archaeological past. It also contends that social and environmental variables need to be combined for these acts of resistance to be correctly interpreted. The third article applies many of the ideas outlined in the second article to a case study in the Greater Southwest during A.D. 1200–1450. Fractures in the ideological landscape demonstrate that the Salado Phenomenon was a religious social movement formed around, and successful because of, its populist nature. Based on variations in how the Salado ideology interacted with contemporaneous hierarchical and non-hierarchical religious and political organizations it is probable that the Salado social movement formed around desires for the open access to religious knowledge.
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Mar 1, 2015
Archaeologists have regarded social networks as both the links through which people transmitted i... more Archaeologists have regarded social networks as both the links through which people transmitted information and goods as well as a form of social storage creating relationships that could be drawn upon in times of subsistence shortfalls or other deleterious environmental conditions. In this article, formal social network analytical (SNA) methods are applied to archaeological data from the late pre-Hispanic North American Southwest to look at what kinds of social networks characterized those regions that were the most enduring versus those that were depopulated over a 250-year period (A.D. 1200–1450). In that time, large areas of the Southwest were no longer used for residential purposes, some of which corresponds with well-documented region-wide drought. Past research has demonstrated that some population levels could have been maintained in these regions, yet regional scale depopulation occurred. We look at the degree to which the network level property of embeddedness, along with population size, can help to explain why some regions were depopulated and others were not. SNA can help archaeologists examine why emigration occurred in some areas following an environmental crisis while other areas continued to be inhabited and even received migrants. Moreover, we modify SNA techniques to take full advantage of the time depth and spatial and demographic variability of our archaeological data set. The results of this study should be of interest to those who seek to understand human responses to past, present, and future worldwide catastrophes since it is now widely recognized that responses to major human disasters, such as hurricanes, were “likely to be shaped by pre-existing or new social networks” (as reported by Suter et al. (Research and Policy Review 28:1–10, 2009)).
KIVA: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History, 2017
Many of these frontier and borderland zones in the Greater American Southwest—these non-places—ar... more Many of these frontier and borderland zones in the Greater American Southwest—these non-places—are often non-hierarchical, or at least less hierarchical than many areas in the Chacoan World. Some of these non-places even prefer a more traditional style of architecture. Places like the crater houses around Chimney Rock (Chuipka 2011), the Gallina, the Valdez Phase near Taos (Boyer 1997; Fowles 2010), and Homol’ovi Pueblo III pithouse communities (Barker and Young 2017) often get labeled as “Out-of-Phase,” as though they failed to predict the eventual rise of the Pecos Classification System or the Northern Rio Grande Sequence. This highlights one of the major underlying processes for the construction of “sexy,” the construction of archaeological popularity, in archaeology. Things that look more like us, get more attention. And in the US Southwest at least, hierarchy is sexy (Borck under review).
In the Gallina district, it is still unclear whether the violence originated with domestic (i.e. ... more In the Gallina district, it is still unclear whether the violence originated with domestic (i.e. local) or foreign agents. This analysis will begin with a brief review of the relevant archaeology of the Gallina area. Following this, I set out to understand who the aggressors might be in this region by employing macroregional spatial analyses in two different case studies. Spatial analysis is ideal for understanding the source of violence in a region. For one, it is applicable at various scales. This is especially important in determining violence between local groups versus violence across a regional landscape. It is only by understanding the spatial patterns of violence that researchers can comprehensively demonstrate the difference between local versus regional, internal versus external patterns.
Resolving the migrant paradox: Two pathways to coalescence in the late precontact U.S. Southwest
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, 2020
The Caribbean Sea was a conduit for human mobility and the exchange of goods and ideas during the... more The Caribbean Sea was a conduit for human mobility and the exchange of goods and ideas during the whole of its pre-colonial history. The period cal. AD 1000-1800, covering the Late Ceramic Age and early colonial era, represents an archaeologically understudied time during which the Lesser Antilles came under increasing influence from the Greater Antilles and coastal South America and participated in the last phase of indigenous resistance to colonial powers. This article summarizes the results of the Island Network project, supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in which a multi-disciplinary set of archaeological, archaeometric, geochemical, GIS, and network science methods and
techniques have been employed to disentangle this turbulent era in regional and global history. These diverse approaches reveal and then explore multi-layered networks of objects and people and uncover how Lesser Antillean communities were created and transformed
through teaching, trade, migration, movement, and exchange of goods and knowledge.
Archaeology Southwest Magazine, 2019
Based on areas where Salado religion flourished (areas in which nearly every household within a s... more Based on areas where Salado religion flourished (areas in which nearly every household within a settlement had Salado pottery) and areas where people rejected it, Salado appears to have been a political movement as well as a religious movement. This movement formed in the most intense areas of immigrant and local interaction. And its message, aimed at marginalized groups regardless of ethnic background, contested elites’ control of ideology associated with platform mounds. Salado was most successful in areas where social inequality was relatively high, because it replaced unequal access to religious and political power with a more equitable distribution, one that harkened back to earlier times in Hohokam history, such as the ballcourt era.
Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2019
Archaeologists reconstruct the activities and
interactions of individuals using the accumulated
m... more Archaeologists reconstruct the activities and
interactions of individuals using the accumulated
material culture of the past, yet detecting these
interactions can be difficult using traditional
archaeological analytical tools. The development
of a methodological framework emerging from
graph theory, coupled with the growth of computational
power and a growing multidisciplinary
theoretical framework aimed at interpreting these
analyses, have eased the difficulties of uncovering,
analyzing, and interpreting networks in the
past. From examining physical locations of sites
and how they interact together (Peregrine 1991) to
examining trade routes and migration pathways
(Hofman et al. 2018), and the exchange of
ideas across time and space (Mills et al. 2013),
network approaches have infiltrated archaeology
and grown exponentially in published studies
(Brughmans 2013; Mills 2017).
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Articles and Book Chapters by Lewis Borck
By taking a diachronic and network perspective, the Gallina become a people who chose their way in their world. Specifically, they decided to step out of a cultural and ideological trajectory diametrically opposed to their ideas on how life should be organized. Once socially and historically situated, the Gallina highlands look more like a place of refuge for people who were rebelling against political and religious changes in the northern Southwest than an area populated by simple folk unable to keep pace with their rapidly changing neighbors. The Gallina region suddenly becomes a much more complicated place—a diverse collection of people dedicated to creating a new community at the edges of their previous world, one with clear material connections to antecedent regional groups (see Simpson 2016) but with new architectural and artifactual forms (i.e., tri-notched axes and pointed-bottom vessels). However, they are not a hybrid group like the colonial resistors Homi K. Bhabha (1994) was describing when he redefined hybridity. Instead, as a product of their atavistic movement, they become hybrids through time. By appropriating the past for their own intentions, they become rebels in their present—pioneers of a future history.
In Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology, edited by Craig N. Cipolla, pp. 29–43. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
organization of society in a way that fosters egal-
itarian or equitable forms of association and coop-
eration and resists all forms of domination. An
anarchist perspective involves an awareness of,
and critique of, how power is implemented
through social relations, whether positively as in
collaborative acts of mutual aid to common goals
or negatively as in assertions of authoritarian
power contrary to the interests of the community
as a whole. As a theory concerning power and
social relations, archaeologists apply anarchism
for analyses of past societies, to interpret and
evaluate forms of egalitarian or hierarchical rela-
tions, modes of domination or resistance, and
expressions of control or autonomy. Moreover, it
is not just for considering the past, but the theory
can be applied to contemporary social arrange-
ments concerning archaeology in multiple ways:
how archaeologists organize themselves for
research teams and field crews, involve local or
descendant communities, or relate to the various
publics concerning heritage. Anarchism has had
an increasing influence upon archaeology in
recent years, just as the theory has influenced
other disciplines throughout the social sciences
and humanities.
techniques have been employed to disentangle this turbulent era in regional and global history. These diverse approaches reveal and then explore multi-layered networks of objects and people and uncover how Lesser Antillean communities were created and transformed
through teaching, trade, migration, movement, and exchange of goods and knowledge.
interactions of individuals using the accumulated
material culture of the past, yet detecting these
interactions can be difficult using traditional
archaeological analytical tools. The development
of a methodological framework emerging from
graph theory, coupled with the growth of computational
power and a growing multidisciplinary
theoretical framework aimed at interpreting these
analyses, have eased the difficulties of uncovering,
analyzing, and interpreting networks in the
past. From examining physical locations of sites
and how they interact together (Peregrine 1991) to
examining trade routes and migration pathways
(Hofman et al. 2018), and the exchange of
ideas across time and space (Mills et al. 2013),
network approaches have infiltrated archaeology
and grown exponentially in published studies
(Brughmans 2013; Mills 2017).