5 June 2024

Call for papers

• Please submit an abstract (200-400 words) by 28th June 2024 by sending it to d.auzina@arch.leidenuniv.nl.
• Abstracts can be submitted in either Spanish or English.
• Presentations are planned to be 25 to 30 minutes in length.
• We encourage contributions from both junior and experienced scholars, and in particular welcome papers from RITMO group members as well as non-members.
• Contributions from various disciplines, such as archaeology, anthropology, history, environmental humanities, and other related fields, are welcome.
• Organisers will provide housing for selected speakers. Presenters should cover their own travel costs to and from Leiden.
• Information about approved proposals will be disseminated by 15th July 2024.

Learn more about the RITMO2 group.

About the meeting

Date: 4-5 October 2024
Venue: Leiden University, Wereldmuseum Leiden

Main organisers
Alex Geurds (Leiden University)
Nikolai Grube (Bonn)

This meeting will focus on the archaeological and ethnographic recognition of balancing human-environmental relationships across the Americas, with particular emphasis on Mesoamerica, the Isthmo-Colombian Area and parts of South America, and links directly to the theme of repetition and emergency, including transition, rupture, and innovation (Project RITMO2, Subtheme 4).

Beginning around 1500 BC, social landscapes emerge across these macro-areas, developing differential trajectories of community development and concomitant material practices. Rather than viewing the ways in which these communities relate to the surrounding world as codified, this symposium proposes to explore the idea of flexibility, made possible through a willingness to experiment and driven by an ability to innovate when so prompted.

Papers at this meeting will present archaeological and ethnographic case studies of how communities freely deal with shifts in climatic patterns and short-term events, including drastic changes that tested or even ruptured pre-existing ways of doing things. Such changes can include, for example, ENSO variability, ITCZ shifts, soil erosion, and volcanic eruption.

A central aim will be to probe the extent of fluidity in human arrangements with surrounding ecologies. Such an approach will connect with Amerindian understandings of the world as capricious, requiring a broad and diverse set of practices. From a world archaeology perspective, this flexibility may be particularly pertinent for indigenous societies in the Americas, given the emphasis on timekeeping and monumentally modifying landscapes, with an initial purpose of, for example, tracking seasonal, climatic, and celestial cycles, and themselves also providing references to deep time.