Rosemary A. Joyce

Rosemary A. Joyce
University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Anthropology

PhD

About

242
Publications
55,303
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
4,624
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 1994 - July 1999
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • Managing Director
July 1986 - June 1989
Harvard University
Position
  • Research Assistant
September 1985 - May 1994
Harvard University
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
August 1978 - May 1985
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Field of study
  • Anthropology
August 1974 - May 1978
Cornell University
Field of study
  • Anthropology

Publications

Publications (242)
Chapter
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Chapter
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
This article exemplifies the way that moving from perspectives on inequality to questions of the exercise of freedom can change archaeological interpretation. Using a case study from Honduras, where conventional models suggest that social evolution stagnated at the level of chiefdoms, the article draws on recent advances in theories of anarchic soc...
Chapter
Historical studies have identified women in nineteenth and twentieth century archaeology who are recognized as pioneers in the field, as Doris Stone is for the archaeology of Central America. Yet a much larger number of women can be identified as participants in research, often viewed as peripheral contributors, artists and specialists like ceramic...
Chapter
Archaeologies of Cultural Contact undertakes an exploration of cultural contact and cultural transfer, with a particular focus on the combination and modification of material and behavioural attributes under conditions of contact. From globalization and displacement to cultural legitimization and identity politics, the modern world is characterized...
Article
Archaeologies of Cultural Contact undertakes an exploration of cultural contact and cultural transfer, with a particular focus on the combination and modification of material and behavioural attributes under conditions of contact. From globalization and displacement to cultural legitimization and identity politics, the modern world is characterized...
Article
Full-text available
This paper argues that geological materials, which modern European thought views as inert, were understood as lively or animated by indigenous people living between 700 and 1200 AD in what today is the nation of Honduras. Spanish colonial petitions, and oral traditions collected as folklore or ethnographic narratives from the descendants of these i...
Article
This article addresses the question of how a ‘site’ comes together through flows of materials. It engages with writing by geographers interested in flat ontologies who propose a view of sites as autonomous congealments of matter that have as one of their effects the suspension, rather than simply decentering, of human subjectivity. A case study fro...
Chapter
A turn to the archaeologically documented past as a source of data for generalizing models explaining the roots of contemporary economic reality can involve treating pasts that were shaped under far different social conditions as equivalent to the contemporary world of nation states and global economies. Using case studies from ancient Mexico and C...
Article
Full-text available
The publication of a book in 2020 that argues against repatriation, on the grounds that it is incompatible with the necessary objectivity required for the production of scientific knowledge, raises issues that most scholars consider long settled. Rather than engage in a detailed review, this commentary revisits the reasons why claims of contributin...
Chapter
This chapter asks how such things produced meanings in their local contexts, both in the Gulf Coast Olmec sites and beyond that region, when similar things were made and used in the highlands of Mexico, in sites along the Pacific Coast, and in the distant areas of Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. It concerns things that are called art, symbolic m...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter outlines how time is understood and measured in research on Mesoamerica; describes the practices that define Mesoamerican cultural traditions, giving special attention to mathematics, and writing that are the most distinctive aspects of the societies. It considers alternative ways of thinking about Mesoamerica as a linguistic area, as...
Chapter
This chapter illustrates how gender histories are created by scholars trained in diverse disciplines using heterogeneous materials and singles out central questions they address. It is organized into three sections: observations about what we know about early villages; a discussion of studies of societies in which economic and political stratificat...
Chapter
The body has become a central focus of archaeological research as practitioners ask questions about the role of individual human beings, their engagement with things, and the effects of embodied actions in the past. The body can serve as a starting point for analyzing diversity in past populations in terms of sex, gender, status, ethnicity, ability...
Chapter
How can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would sat...
Chapter
THE GOAL THAT THE markers experts imagined for the nuclear waste repository marker was for it to be imposing, impressive, yet unattractive. They wanted to produce a physical installation that could convey these meanings through its form. In Team A’s designs, this involved using “menacing” features like sharp pointed elements, made of materials like...
Chapter
This chapter provides a deeper discussion of the theories of meaning and communication that were employed by the experts involved in developing plans for nuclear waste repository marker systems. These linguistic, semiotic, and psychological models were more important to planners than archaeological models for the material form. These models emphasi...
Chapter
This chapter explores the second major element of the marker design, which called for a massive earthen berm, supported by citing mounds of the US Midwest, including Monk’s Mound at Cahokia and the Great Serpent Mound. It explores how the engineering knowledge needed to construct these mounds is underestimated by the markers’ experts, and how the a...
Chapter
This chapter examines the diverse features cited to justify the idea that inscriptions on the surfaces of the monoliths could convey meanings into the future. Experts and government agencies changed their cited models multiple times, finally arriving at the Athenian Acropolis and Australian aboriginal rock art as unlikely paired models, after consi...
Book
How can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would sat...
Chapter
How can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would sat...
Chapter
This chapter explores the understanding of Stonehenge, the support for major features of the proposed design for markers for nuclear waste repositories. The proposed design would have two concentric lines of stone monoliths justified explicitly by a claim that Stonehenge’s contemporary remains survived as indications of its original plan and intent...
Chapter
Stone from the outer rim of an enormous square is dynamited and then cast into large concrete/stone blocks, dyed black, and each about 25 feet on a side. They are deliberately irregular and distorted cubes. The cubic blocks are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot-wide “streets” running both ways. You can get “in” it, but the streets lead...
Chapter
How can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would sat...
Chapter
This chapter examines the role in the marker design of buried objects intended to be inscribed with messages. Modeled on works like the Rosetta Stone, the stele of Hammurabi, and cuneiform tablets, this part of the design turned the marker system into an artificial archaeological site. Debates are explored about how meanings are effectively communi...
Chapter
The concluding chapter explores the visions of the future that experts involved in advising the US Department of Energy developed, as formal parts of their planning documents. These narratives are almost the only place in the planning process where the specific local populations are mentioned. Turning to the question of the people who live in these...
Article
In recent years, researchers in pre-Hispanic Central America have used new approaches that greatly amplify and enhance evidence of plants and their uses. This paper presents a case study from Puerto Escondido, located in the lower Ulúa River valley of Caribbean coastal Honduras. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using multiple methods in concert...
Article
Gender and sexuality emerged as themes in archaeology in the late twentieth century, in part as archaeological explanation required greater attention to the specific identity of agents, in part due to influence from feminist science studies, but also due to shifting demographics bringing more women into the field. Central concerns with the relation...
Article
Social groups in Honduras played a key role in regional developments between a.d. 800 and 1100, acting as the pivot in long-distance networks extending west as far as Tula, north to Chichen Itza, and south to Costa Rica. Understanding the role of Honduran settlements at this time has been obstructed by the lack of well-dated contexts from this peri...
Article
Full-text available
The Honduran incumbent president and his administration recently declared victory in an election riddled with irregularities and indicators of fraud. Perhaps most curious, however, was a numerical anomaly: the primary challenger carried a very significant lead of five percentage points more than half way through the election but was ultimately defe...
Book
Bringing together 25 case studies from archaeological projects worldwide, Engaging Archaeology candidly explores personal experiences, successes, challenges, and even frustrations from established and senior archaeologists who share invaluable practical advice for students and early-career professionals engaged in planning and carrying out their ow...
Chapter
The Early Formative Olmec are central in a wide variety of debates regarding the development of Mesoamerican societies. A fundamental issue in Olmec archaeology is the nature of interregional interaction among contemporaneous societies and the possible Olmec role in it. Previous debates have often not been informed by recent research and data, ofte...
Chapter
This chapter addresses religion as implicated in political change in Formative Period Honduras (ca. 1600–400 B.C.). I argue that the materiality of religious practice is both a productive site for recommitting to existing beliefs, and provides the only medium through which to transform beliefs. By examining media marked with representational imager...
Book
In Painted Pottery from Honduras Rosemary Joyce describes the development of the Ulua Polychrome tradition in Honduras from the fifth to sixteenth centuries AD, and critically examines archaeological research on these objects that began in the nineteenth century. Previously treated as a marginal product of Classic Maya society, this study shows tha...
Chapter
Review of archaeological approaches informed by feminist thinking about materialities.
Chapter
The Early Formative Olmec are central in a wide variety of debates regarding the development of Mesoamerican societies. A fundamental issue in Olmec archaeology is the nature of interregional interaction among contemporaneous societies and the possible Olmec role in it. Previous debates have often not been informed by recent research and data, ofte...
Article
Maya Figurines: Intersections between State and Household. Halperin Christinat 2014. University of Texas Press, Austin. 300 pp. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 978- 0-292-77130-7. - Volume 27 Issue 1 - Rosemary A. Joyce
Article
The archaeological contribution to materiality has to date been less widely appreciated by practitioners outside the subdiscipline. This chapter argues that this is in part due to the identification of archaeological materiality with things, objects, or material culture, deriving from the twentieth-century history of Americanist archaeology in part...
Chapter
Studies of the newly emerging field ofmateriality examine the various ways in which physical objects that populate the environments we inhabit affect us socially, psychologically, and culturally. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences are actively engaged in such studies of what they term the new materialism. It examines how “things” sh...
Chapter
Heteronormativity is an ideology that assumes that it is universally natural for human beings to engage in unique sexual pairings between members of two sexes, male and female. Heteronormativity emerged as a topic of research when queer theory questioned the assumption that biological sex was naturally the dichotomous basis for gender and sexuality...
Chapter
Archaeologists approach ritual and symbolism from a material basis: through the places, things, and trace residues left behind as a result of human action in the past. Where historically, archaeologists adopted definitions of ritual, religion, and symbolism that were rooted in structuralism, today they increasingly draw on the semiotics of Charles...
Chapter
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Book
Settle into your favorite sofa, put your feet up, and – without taking a step – join in the dance that partners people with things and changes them both. In Things in Motion, you will witness how the movement transforms people’s places and the things people touch. The essays are global in scope, following the itinerary of glass beads from Europe to...
Book
This edited volume brings together forensic archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and mortuary archaeologists, along with cultural anthropologists, to discuss the effects, engagements, and ethics of excavating human bodies and the place of bodies in archaeology.
Article
The choice of this theme for debate has been stimulated by recent discussions of the globalization of art history, and the increasing emphasis placed in the discipline on the notion of “world art history,” perhaps best exemplified by the books of James Elkins and David Summers: James Elkins, Is Art History Global? and David Summers, Real Spaces: Wo...
Article
Evidence from sites in the lower Ulua Valley of north-central Honduras occupied between 500 and 1000 AD provides new insight into the connections between households, craft production, and the role of objects in maintaining social relations within and across households. Production of pottery vessels, figurines, and other items in a household context...
Article
Full-text available
Paleoethnobotanical analyses of samples excavated at Los Naranjos, Honduras, provide an unprecedented record of the diversity of plants used at an early center with monumental architecture and sculpture dating between 1000 and 500 B.C. and contribute to understandings of early village life in Mesoamerica. Los Naranjos is the major site adjacent to...
Chapter
The Body as a Scene of Display The Body as Artifact Embodiment and Embodied Subjectivity Judith Butler's Influence on Archaeologies of Embodiment Archaeologies of Embodied Subjectivity Archaeology and Embodiment: Some Final Thoughts References
Book
Focusing on marriage figurines—double human figurines that represent relations formed through social alliances—Hendon, Joyce, and Lopiparo examine the material relations created in Honduras between AD 500 and 1000, a period of time when a network of social houses linked settlements of a variety of sizes in the region. The authors analyze these smal...
Article
The choice of this theme for debate has been stimulated by recent discussions of the globalization of art history, and the increasing emphasis placed in the discipline on the notion of “world art history,” perhaps best exemplified by the books of James Elkins and David Summers: James Elkins, Is Art History Global? and David Summers, Real Spaces: Wo...
Chapter
Honduran Formative period figurines of the Middle Formative Playa de los Muertos tradition, their rare Early Formative predecessors, and the equally rare Late Formative figurines that follow in a small part of the area of Playa figurines manufacture, incorporate richly detailed imagery indexing bodily adornment (using "index" in the sense defined b...
Article
This article examines the contradictions, responsibilities and opportunities that inhere when the authenticity of the tourist experience results at least in part from having an archaeologist guide. It is argued that archaeologists are always participants in tourism, through the visions of the past they offer in even the most scholarly of papers, th...
Chapter
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology provides a current guide to the recent and on-going archaeology of Mesoamerica. Though the emphasis is on prehispanic societies, this text also includes coverage of important new work by archaeologists on the Colonial and Republican periods. Unique among recent works, the text brings together in a sin...
Chapter
Archaeological excavations on the north coast of Honduras at CR-337, an archaeological site we identify as the pre-Hispanic and colonial town Ticamaya (Figure 10.1), produced a stratigraphic record with radiocarbon dates as early as 1300–1400 ce and artifacts dating as late as the nineteenth century (Blaisdell-Sloan 2006; Wonderley 1984a, 1984b). A...
Chapter
I am pretty widely characterized (by others) as a post-processual archaeologist, more specifically (an identification I actually agree with), as a feminist archaeologist. So what am I doing, enthusiastically endorsing the idea that the future of archaeology requires us to integrate archaeological science even more fully into our practice and explan...

Network

Cited By