Jerry D. Moore will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Monday, September 18, at 12:15 pm. His talk is entitled “Making Andean Houses: Materials, Affordances, and Possibilities in Vernacular Architecture.”
Since the 1960s archaeological approaches to vernacular
architecture have emphasized the connections between house and household. The
‘house’ was a pivotal analytical nexus in those efforts, and the development of
household archaeology became and remains a robust, global field of
archaeological investigation. But in some instances, the ‘house’ has been lost
in the study of household archaeology. In part this is due to what Tim Ingold
has called the
adoption of the “hylomorphic model of creation” in social science and
humanities fields that proposes “form” and “matter” are essential compounds to
making. Interpretations of the hylomorphic model of creation have led to an
unbalanced relationships with “Form being imposed upon the material world… by
an agent with a particular end or goal in mind .. while matter .. [is]
–rendered passive and inert” (Ingold 2010: 91). This perspective limits
understanding of making. In this talk Moore considers Ingold’s argument that
this model is more profitably replaced by “an ontology that assigns primacy to
processes of formation as against their final products.” This perspective on
making is particularly germane to thinking about vernacular architecture and
the processes of formation, directly relevant for understanding domestic architecture
of Andean houses.
Dr. Jerry D. Moore is Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His archaeological research has been supported by NSF, NEH, the National Geographic Society, and other foundations and organizations. He has written Architecture and Power in the Prehispanic Andes: The Archaeology of Public Buildings (1996), Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (2012 4th ed.), Cultural Landscapes in the Prehispanic Andes: Archaeologies of Place (2005), The Prehistory of Home (2012; 2014 Society for American Archaeology Book Award), A Prehistory of South America: Ancient Cultural Diversity of the Least Known Continent (2014), Incidence of Travel: Recent Journeys in Ancient South America (2017), and other books, articles, and scientific papers. He is the editor of Ñawpa Pacha: Journal of Andean Archaeology and currently a fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC.
This event will be livestreamed. Please check back the day of the event for a link to the video. To watch videos of past events please visit our YouTube page.
