 Today, we're moving to South America, and Kat Huggins, although Bethlehem, I think I've ever said that to you. I know. Nobody calls me Kathleen. But there she is. Is talking about her work, her work this summer in the field in South America on my project, which is absolutely wonderful in the Andes. And really, her ontological base is probably for her thesis, so it's really exciting. Stephen, I hope you pay full attention to that. Thank you. So thank you, everybody, for being here. I just want to briefly recognize that Monday was Indigenous People's Day, so I hope everybody was able to take time to reflect on what that means for you individually or for us moving forward as a nation and taking more time to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples that we live with. So anyway, my name's Kathleen Huggins, and let's go. So a deep reading of ethnographies from archaeological research areas frequently leads to adoption of Indigenous terms. And in that process, a reassessment or an abandonment of terms from Western anthropological canon, we can use this process of reinterpretation as a chance when we can also recognize that we have a position relative to these terms, which are often the structuring principles in our research areas. And we can review our archaeological praxis in the communities we work in can change during this reinterpretation. In this presentation, I aim to demonstrate how a reinterpretation of Indigenous Andean social concepts can be achieved by resisting the general outline of Mao's essay, The Gift. I emphasize that Indigenous and post-colonial archaeology still follow in a Durkheimian and Mausian legacy of cross-cultural comparison and how we apply anthropological work to social policy. I'll attempt to demonstrate that we can understand an Andean model of reciprocity as distinct from Mao's model, one not based on economics or debt, but in a motif of domestication, cooperative care, and anti-individualism. And I want to underscore how this understanding has challenged archaeological theories as I apply them to my own dissertation research design. So basically, the presentation is going to go through translation theory, sort of a process of de-gifting the Andes, which is the reinterpretation of Andean reciprocity and entification. And then I want to look at how Andean theories challenge archaeological theory. And then I'll briefly introduce my future work, and I hope to do future presentations to explain this better to everybody. So let's see. The process of interpretation in Andean archaeology has been complicated since its beginning. In ceramics, for example, Inca jars, which are this one, are often called arribelos due to an early classification which used the term for oil and wine jars produced in ancient Rome. In Quechua, these jars are actually called urpus. Yet today, the term arribelos become tacitly accepted by Western archaeologists as well as Peruvian and Bolivian archaeologists. Though it seems rather harmless, just one word for another, these kinds of mistranslations and the importation of terms from Western anthropological canon come from a long history of really polemic arguments about the origin of diffusion of cultures into the Americas. Today, there's a deep resistance to this process, which is based in indigenous and post-colonial method and theory. For instance, we all know that the description of the Inca empire as the Rome of the new world is absolutely cringe-worthy, as many Mayanists can understand. However, when you look at urpus and amphoras, you can understand this initial problem. There exists some kind of recognizability which we can't help but acknowledge. What other term could we use for these vessels? How do we, people who live in these distant places in these very foreign places, communicate with people who have never traveled to our study areas? How else can they understand ceramics from an erased and conquered civilization if not through terms passed down from a near-continuous line of Western history? And I say this sarcastically. I suggest that archaeology's initial desire to call these jars or ribolos is because of a familiarity, not with these jars or between Roman and Andean styles, but with familiarity itself. As anthropologists working in foreign places, we're constantly butting up against familiar practices and modes of life. Things which seem too alike to not be related or at least attributable to some kind of underlying quasi-universal cause or structure. In line with post-colonial anthropology, however, I suggest that we strongly resist this familiarity. Not by outright cringing denial, but instead whenever we feel something is too familiar to be true, I think we should dive deeper into it. In 1925, Marcel Maus published an essay on the gift, the form and reason of exchange in archaic societies. Maus described a number of societies participating in very similar reciprocal exchange systems, including the Haida and Plingit of the Northwest Coast, Melanesian and Polynesian societies in Oceania, native Alaskans and Australians, as well as Roman, Germanic and other Indo-European legal systems from archaeological cultures. Maus felt that beneath so much cultural aesthetic variation, an archaic gift exchange system, or some variant of it, still remained unchanged, hidden, and lurking beneath the surface of most cultures, even modern society. It's hard to deny that something like a gift exchange system does exist in many cultures, but I think we're better served and we do better by our communities when we fight against familiarity. And we go, and against directly translating every single instance of gift exchange as yet another variant of Maus's model. One way to think of this kind of direct translation in anthropology is that there's first an experience, the ethnographic experience. And after, or during our participation in it, we author a translation of those events which gets at the core of the experience. No one ever really feels like we've covered every aspect, but we hope we've covered at least its core. This kind of translation, however, is incredibly difficult and many linguists suggest it's actually impossible. In extreme cases, authors concerned with cross-cultural and epistemological comparisons suggest that these experiences don't even exist in the same world. In her book, Earth Beings, Marisol de la Cadena demonstrates one way to resist direct translation. And she suggests that our tendency to react to familiarity by providing English translations of indigenous terms is a practice of equivocation. De la Cadena explains this by discussing the translation of Earth Beings or Terakuna in Quechua as mountain spirits. This translation of Terakuna as mountain spirit is not wrong, she says, but it risks an equivocation that leaves the Earth being behind. I'm not talking about different cultural perspectives on the same entity, but about different entities emerging in more than one and less than many worlds. And their practices, they can overlap and remain distinct at the same time. I believe that direct translation of Andean forms of reciprocity and gift giving also leaves something critical behind. These Andean reciprocity practices are undeniably familiar to those of us who have already read the Melanesian and Archaic examples which Maus presents. But if we're not careful, this familiarity can lead to uncritical equivocations. What De la Cadena says about Earth beings existing in more than one and less than many worlds, and also words actually, and her use of the term equivocation is important to understand. Essentially, when we cite Maus to explain indigenous reciprocity structures, we evoke them in English writing and they emerge in our world as a distinct thing from the practice itself. In Viveris de Castro's discussion of equivocation, he suggests that every culture is a gigantic multi-dimensional process of comparison, but direct comparability does not necessarily entail immediate translatability. Essentially this is because translating cultural beliefs into anthropological concepts is a transformative process, basically creating a new thing, an equivocation. Equivocation is basically when one word or concept means two different things. This is when the translation of a cultural experience and the actual experience have overlapping characteristics. Sometimes even sharing overlapping terms, but they're still entirely distinct entities, epistemologically speaking. In translation theory, Quine writes that this pattern of overlap is because translation happens at arm's length and further that denotational equivalence, which is direct translation, said in another more complicated way, is either impossible or inherently flawed. As Quine writes, the uniformity that unites us in communication and belief is a uniformity of resultant patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of connections between words and experiences. While this is all theoretically heady, the idea of equivocation can help us understand why it can be so difficult, but really so important to translate ethnographic experiences into satisfying ethnographic models. When we translate Andean reciprocity practices as Mausian, we run a risk of not looking carefully at the indigenous terms which we have been overlapping. As frustrating as this might seem though, it's not a hostile deconstruction. In an actionable suggestion, Descaster proposes a form of controlled equivocation, and De La Cabana calls this slowing down the translation through a careful process of co-laboring and co-authoring with indigenous communities, not exactly rejecting equivocations as fallacious, but looking more carefully for other shared terms, carefully connecting more parts of the experience together, and examining those terms which we've already tacitly accepted as equivalent. I suggest we bring this same kind of attention to slow translation into indigenous and post-colonial archaeologies, and also privilege indigenous concepts rather than using Western terms as sufficient explanations. But before I go into my own attempt to slow translation of Andean reciprocity, I want to make it clear that it's not my intention to trash Maus entirely, or look a gift horse in the mouth. Maus' contributions to anthropology and archaeology should be acknowledged, and from them we can also gain practical footing in post-colonial projects. In the forward of the 1990 edition of The Gift, translated into English by W.D. Hall, Mary Douglas writes that Maus followed the key tenet of Durkheim's designs for the social sciences, being that every serious philosophical work should bear on public policy, and hence that the theory of the gift is actually a theory of human solidarity. Douglas suggests that the gift stands as part of a program of anti-individualism, popular in French authorship of the time. Though, Douglas reminds us that Maus and Durkheim argued for a more nuanced vision of anti-individualism, which, while it emphasized the reality and scope of rule-governed behavior, still encouraged political systems to allow for individual expression. Maus' work then put to the fore the importance of gift-giving at the individual level, or otherwise the agential level, as it would later become known, in expressing and in fact actualizing social reality and therefore creating institutions, history as well as common generosity and deep emotional bonds. Post-colonial archeology shares Durkheim's vision of effecting policy change, and Maus' palpable fondness for a theory of human solidarity, his search for the spirit of the gift, is shared by researchers who wish to engage in indigenous, community, and collaborative archeology projects. For my own work, a slow translation of the Andean mode of reciprocity will also bear on policy, in so much as it's gonna affirm my archeological praxis, including the questions I ask, the methods I use, and how I position myself in my work. The first step then in my research has actually been to explore ethnographic materials and to create a basic framework which I can take with me to the field to test, correct, and expand with co-authors and Charipa. In the Andes, redistribution systems have been recognized since John Mora presented his 1969 treatise on the vertical archipelago model. Mora's model posits that Andean populations are able to cope with harsh climates and sharp changes in altitude by distributing settlements vertically across altitudinal microzones, where different products could be exploited and then distributed across the variable landscape. These populations were related often by kinship, community, or IU. For those versed in Andean ethnography, we know IU can be a sticky term, but for general reference, IU is a complex, Imara, and Quechua concept which entails a large community that includes livestock, landscapes, and topographic and non-human entities. Because of the great distance between communities, Mora suggested that Andean folks still relied on archaic, deep time system of reciprocity and redistribution. And Mora argued that this system became the framework for most social relations and institutions in the Andes. For Mora, this is why the Andean region doesn't seem to have a market-based economy, but is instead based on redistribution. Its greatest expression, for instance, was the system of storehouses along the Inka Road, Kapa Knyan. This interpretation of an Andean model of reciprocity, then, seems, at first, to follow the Mausian structure. It includes obligations to create perpetual cycles of gift and return gift within and between generations. And, like Malinowski's Kula distribution model, a work implicitly related to Mauses, the network of Inka storehouses also created a highly formalized system of redistribution. But, how profound is this equivocation? Looking at Andean ethnographies, it's possible to parse out a much larger and more careful interpretation of an Andean reciprocity model, which I'll begin to illustrate here. First, I propose that Andean reciprocity is actually structured around the theme of domestication. In indigenous Andean terms, this theme is uiwei in Quechua, or uiwei uiwanya in Imara, which roughly translates to rearing or domesticate husbandry. Marisol de la Cadena gives us an example of the uiwei theme as a central tenet of intraaction and mutual care in modern Andean communities, with the case of Nazario, Apaku, or Shaman, from the Cusco region, who became deeply obligated and essentially voluntold by his entire community to walk the grievance during the Peruvian agrarian reform of the 1960s. To explain how the uiwei theme permeates Andean society, Aksa, another Andean scholar, tells us that respect and care are a fundamental part of life in the Andes. They're not a concept or an explanation. To care and be respectful means to want to be reared and to rear. This implies not only humans, but all world beings. We rear our kids and they rear us. We rear the seeds, the animals, and plants, and they also rear us. Hence, uiwei, or co-rearing, is the sense that the responsibilities of domestication render a unique reciprocity system, which not only moves goods and spurs ritual and moral obligations, but is the context, the structuring principle within which all entities are born. Important for my attempt here to create a structural model of domestication come reciprocity, De La Cadena also points out that uiwei is not necessarily egalitarian, but actually disposed to hierarchical organizations, allowing us to parse out steers of responsibility and obligation to reciprocate with upper, lower, and central players. In a conversation with the Aymara linguist, Juan de Diosiapita this summer, who is also my Aymara teacher, Juan drew from me a basic diagram explaining that the mountain peaks are the uiwei, or the caretakers of humans, wild animals, and domesticated animals, but also that the humans are the uiwei of their own domesticated animals. From Denise Arnold's work on the role of houses, or uta, and tattling on misbehaving folks to these local mountains, it's also possible to parse out a relationship between the houses and the mountain, the uiwei mountains. Though I don't know if they have a position of power yet, or if they play more of an intermediary role between the uiwei peaks or the uiwei humans, or even if it's possible to draw such a structural diagram from these kind of notes and observations. However, further from Ochoa's work on the terms for South American domesticates, we also know that Aymara and Quechua words for domesticate is uiwei, and that different kinds of domesticates are then subdivided based on what specific goods they produce. All of these terms, and the repeated use of the ui root, brings linguistic support to the idea that domestication plays an important thematic role in the structuring principle of Andean communities, as well as the importance of what goods and services the members within such a structure produce and distribute. Briefly, looking closer at this linguistic data, it's important to emphasize that the root ui exists in both Aymara and Quechua. Aymara and Quechua are the most common and currently established indigenous highland Andean languages today. There were more in the past, but they are very quickly dying out. Communities and Andes generally speak one or the other. Both are agglutinative languages with logic structures very distinct from the fusional languages like English. It's been estimated that upwards of 30% of Aymara and Quechua words share common stems, but both languages use unique affixes. This has been attributed to the prevalence of multilingualism in the Andes, which was reported at the time of Spanish arrival, and to such redistribution networks that Mura observed. The idea that both Quechua and Aymara communities emphasize who and what the designated uiwa and uiwiri, or domesticates and caretakers, are in their community landscapes, may be a strong indication that the uiwa and uiwanya structure is a kind of pan-Andean domestication-themed reciprocity model. Although, sorry, I lost my plate. Although it's an early sketch, this model of uiwanya represents a glimpse at how different Andean reciprocity is from Mausian cases. For instance, in contrast to the Melanesian system based on economic reciprocity and gift exchange, the uiwanya system emphasizes that reciprocity is motivated by the obligations of caretakers in the domestication process and the obligations of domesticates to in turn deliver goods upwards to their caretakers. Well, I prefer caretaker as a reinterpretation of the Aymara word uiwiri. It's more common use as guardian also indicates the kind of defense a farmer or herder provides to domesticates. In the Andes, even mountains can provide this defense. For example, the Guardian Mountain of Kuso, Aosangate, also known as the Rainbow Mountain if anybody's seen those really great tourist photos, is known to have helped the Inca win a war against invaders by rallying local stones and boulders to their defense. Likewise, Yama herders must repel attacks by puma or wild dogs and farmers must protect their crops from hail through apitropaic measures or even simply scheduling selling so that fresh buds don't emerge during hail season. Indian reciprocity then is not based on extraction or redistribution of excess goods for the maintenance of abstract power or social wealth but the provisioning of goods which were generated or gathered specifically to sustain that community and the defense of your community members. However, you can ask, what exactly are those goods being delivered upwards to the highest guardian, the Ui Uiri Tirukuna? Obligations to feed and respect Andean mountains have been interpreted as a form of ritualized animistic reciprocity and equivocation with the obligation to redistribute goods imbued with the how essence which Mao's describes. In the Andes, it's very common to create offering bundles which are burnt and said to be fed to Pachamama or to the earth or to other landscape entities. However, although they may contain small objects, these offering bundles are prepared not as packages of goods or as gifts but as actual plates of food. Hence, these offerings are not gifts meant to bring the earth into supplication or indebtedness but they're more nourishing feasts just the same as the food domesticates provide farmers and that farmers provide to their domesticates. These offerings are meant to sustain the health and life of caretakers so that the entire system of co-rearing, co-carrying and interdependence can continue. The inclusion of animistic terms in Mao's model such as how and mana has contributed greatly to its use in the Andes but when we pull the Andean reciprocity away from a Mao'sian interpretation, we begin to see that understanding burnt offering bundles as efforts to nurture and fertilize the landscape underscores a critical point of difference between the Andean system and the Mao'sian model. This difference is that the powerful exchange goods we'd normally expect in a Mao'sian system like the kula, necklaces and arm shells which are exchanged in Papua New Guinea area are not embedded in the Andean reciprocity structure. Indeed, much of the goods which move through Andean structure are basically foodstuffs. So we have to ask ourselves, is there Andean kula? Like Asangate outside of Cusco and other respected mountains, non-human agencies situated on landscape can reward their communities with protection and benevolence. They can also have unique identities and predilections which cause harm. Small objects and non-human entities also have a kind of livingness and this can be superficially similar to Mao's description of the agential power of objects containing how or mana. This essence, however, is called sami which has been translated to breath. I suggest that unlike mana, sami is not a mechanism of Andean reciprocity. Instead, the domestic reciprocity structure is basically the context within which entities are instilled with sami. Unlike the Melanesian how or mana, rather than building over time as the object is exchanged, sami is instilled in bodies and objects through the practice of dedicated labor. For example, a popular description of an enlivened object is a common wooden cooking spoon which Catherine Allen was told had an ethnographer working in the Andes, was told had the same equality because it was skillfully made but also because it had been used for many years. Other living objects could be small engraved stones or even uniquely shaped rocks found near rivers which had been worn down by erosional process, hence slowly crafted by the landscape itself. In Quechua, making a special kind of enlivened thing is understood as kamai. Notably, other words exist for making in general but kamai is a specific synonym used in the case of enlivened objects. Contemporary skilled makers are referred to as santo yuk but linguists suggest that this term is related to an inqueic position of kipu readers, kipu kamaiak, kipu being the knotted string system which we believe was used in the Andes as a form of writing. This is discussed by Catherine Allen who writes that santo yuk are the skilled craftsperson who work under the guidance of a saint. This saint is asked to guide the person's body through the steps of making but also to guide the ingredients that the maker is working with to allow a successful imparting of form to matter and to allow the possibility that the sami quality, the breath, will emerge in that object. The saint's guidance in this way is to do what has been done before and can be repeatedly done but with help. To work well is to successfully replicate the actions of a teacher or another skilled person. While the ability to impart breath or to kamai sami can be requested from either Uri or from saints, there is still an emphasis on repetitive labor even in requesting this assistance. For example, Catherine Allen's descriptions of the santo yuk or skilled craftsman includes descriptions of the crafters deriving their talent from a close relationship developed over many years of trial and error as well as constant communication with the crafting saints. According to Allen, santo yuk will regularly murmur quietly at a crafting saints while they work. As well, Peter Wogan in writing on the, what he describes as a misinterpretation of reported equivalence between writing and weaving in the Andes, which is an equivocation I'd love to go into that can basically be summarized as they're both hard and then that got translated to they're both the same. Wogan tells us that children learning how to write offer samples of work to a local landscape situated saint. The same saint, which weavers learning their craft also offer pieces of similarly tedious and difficult work. This could suggest that the, oh, I skipped a head of slide. This could suggest that the same saint, which weaver, I lost my place, I'm so sorry. The shared attribute of difficulty and wretch, this suggests basically that the shared attribute of difficulty and repetition are very important to Andy and craftspersons and it's also contained within the Iwanya system. And we also need to emphasize that there's a lot of emphasis on the need to consult and communicate with landscape entities during the learning and crafting process. Many ethnographers go on to also suggest that the Sami quality produces an inextricable link between the maker and the maid. Objects not only contain and are constrained and defined by the physical stuff of the environment that they're made out of, but they also maintain a communicative link with the environment despite distance. So reflecting on the sense that co-rearing or Iwanya is implicit in the Iwanya reciprocity structure and the habit of skilled makers to communicate regularly with landscape situated saints, this communicative link may be because the originating landscape is considered a legitimate co-maker and co-author of the object. And through skilled work has become actually part of that object. If we're to look back to Mao's in this case, Sami is less like Hao or Mana and more akin to what Mao says is the underlying moral component of a gift which is that to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of yourself. So now I'm gonna move into how this all kind of reflects back on archeological theory. So I'd like to suggest that by slowly translating powerful objects as outside the reciprocity structure, explanations of how objects gain the quality of Sami can present examples of an indigenous theory of technology. And better yet, they can illustrate how indigenous conceptualizations can teach archeologists to mediate some of our stickiest theoretical debates. An Indian indigenous theory of technology can, for example, present a synthetic definition of technology which challenges our internal discussions concerning agency, specialization, and representation. In regards to agency, I think it's incredibly interesting when we position the Sami quality in conversation with the idea of experiential matter which is proposed by process relational philosophers like Whitehead. For Whitehead, experience happens all the way down at the atomic level as phenomena or events. Consciousness is the result of a body which is organized to experience consciousness. And as Whitehead suggests, the many become one and are increased by one. Frandy and peoples, while this is likely familiar, it's not at all universal truth. Many identical objects vary in importance and power based on who made them and how they were used. So this kind of concept for consciousness or agency is only qualitatively true when certain demands are met. A Sami full object is not enlivened during the process of being made but instead at the success of being made. Because kamai basically indicates making, the kamaiing of Sami mirrors a practice theorist definition of technology which emphasize agency. But unlike agency or even object agency theories, the Sami quality can vary in quantity and forcefulness. Agency is a binary, you either have it or you don't. Power is the one that varies in quantity. The success of imparting Sami into an object comes not from that object's becoming but in being well made and used. The Sami quality only emerges from felicitous events rather than autopoiesis or self-organization. To be enlivened, animated, to have undergone the process of identification. However we choose to interpret kamai, Sami is a marked quality attributable to real in the world practical variables which include the influence of the environment, the skillful gestures of a maker and how an object participates and is useful. The linguist Bruce Mannheim argues that subtle logics in Quechua allow us to formulate, reformulate irritating object agency theories as kinds of cooperative entification rather than explicit consciousness or agency. Which means we can read concepts like kamai, Sami as complex philosophical statements about how valueladen identities which look like and are discussed as consciousnesses can emerge. Looking then at specialization which is my favorite way to look at kamai we see how this instantly reframes the specialist character which we commonly build up in archeological narratives. Access to technological knowledge and specialization are contained in the kamai, Sami theory but with an emphasis on replication and repetition which is very similar to many popular definitions of technology especially those associated with mass production. But in archeology this modeling of technologies through non-linear operational sequences is most similar to what Goron and Lemontier suggest. Just as Andy and Santayuk placed their bodies in the force of saints and co-create in a reactive and hopeful gestural flow we archeologists model specialists as acting out operational sequences which can stop pause or even be abandoned as other sequences intervene. But because of the co-creation implicit in the Uiwanya structure we can no longer think of singular specialists but always as groups working together even if that group includes only one human. Finally looking at the idea that entified objects remain in communication with their makers both the humans and the landscape we also gain footing on stressful theoretical debates in archeology about representation. For example in behavioral approaches to archeology we identify object attributes as indications of the behaviors of the maker or otherwise as physical representations of the and the vestiges of the act of making. However in Kamai Sami these are continuous connections to a range of co-authors human and non-human. The Sami full object is an indexical trace rather than a symbolic or representational signature of doing and in discussions of Sami can really help anthropologists and archeologists revisit and acknowledge common laxity and the way that we use obtuse and loaded words like sign, signature, index, icon and symbol. But to slow down it's not my intention to directly translate Kamai or Sami as Persian or even as semiotic. But again to outline that these are independent indigenous theories which will help inform my research. In summary in strong contrast to Mao's model of how or mana as a driving force of redistribution the Sami qualities of non-human entities don't appear to drive Andean reciprocity. Rather Uluwanya reciprocity is the context for amplification. By teasing out this difference by pursuing this familiarity we can see an emphasis on trial and error which tells us that investing in repeated labor as well as repeated attempts to communicate with Uwiri underscores the creation of enlivened potent objects. With all this in mind I'll now transition to how this Uluwanya system and the related Sami-Kamai dynamic has very directly influenced my praxis as I prepare for dissertation field work. First of all I accept the Uwanya obligations are self-sustaining relationships and that the act of generosity and reciprocation is also self-defining. These are those virtue qualities I've mentioned a couple of times. As I've come to understand it the obligation to sustain your caretakers enacted in the form of offerings to mountains and home shrines is akin to an Aragon in Aristotelian virtue ethics. We know Aragon most normally in the term ergonomics. An Aragon is an action or function which defines that object or person basically. So a person cannot be runa or Andean folk without doing the actions of a runa. Hence the obligation to seed labor, goods or words to Uwiri is that runa's Aragon, their definitional virtue. As archeologists, this means that when I'm invited I'm not only obliged to participate in community meetings but that participating in those meetings is one of my own definitional traits for that community. Put another way, we're not expected to attend but if we don't attend we're not archeologists. We can't work with that community. Second, I understand that Kamai Swami or Andean theories of technology emphasize the role of trial and error as well as communication during crafting especially those crafts which require arduous and repetitive labor. This means that taking time to talk with community members and taking strides to learn Imara can help me in my own labor as an archeologist. Also means that trial and error are forgivable and pretty much expected so long as I continue to talk with my teachers. Further, because Andean reciprocity is not a form of economic exchange but a critical aspect of the self-sustaining Andean community, I recognize that the Uwania structure demands that the product of my labor and turn provisions and aids the labor of others. When we don't provision communities with the goods that they helped us produce we work against the flow and we inevitably face and inflict hardship on other people. Further, the goods that I produce should be useful to the community. My results should be at least as useful as the wool produced by Yamas. These tenets of research are of course the basic tenets of collaborative archeology but I believe that having arrived at these insights through a post-colonial approach to reinterpreting Mausian terms in the Andes will let me find my place not based on adding even more Western terms concerning ethical commitments but rather that my commitments will come from an actual desire to understand and listen to Andean communities. So, getting to the meat. At this point my project essentially divides into two primary sections being an ethno-archaeology and an arts conservation project in Tripa and a study of early formative ceramic materials which I use a low-cost, high-resolution photographic analysis technique. I'll do this briefly because I know all of that just took up a lot of time. My ethnographic project aims to study and conserve a form of basketry making practiced in Turaco Peninsula, which is my research area, which is situated along the shoreline of Lake Titicaca and Bolivia. Because of the wealth of modern tools and materials in the area, many traditional crafts have disappeared from the contemporary Bolivian highlands even as the region excels in the production of indigenous agricultural cultures, namely potatoes and root vegetables. Still, some elder farmers in Turaco continue to produce a special form of woven grass basket, which is made out of Ichu, a type of high-altitude bunch grass. Over the summer I was able to work with one basket-making household, Luis and his wife, Christine Tarky. Luis told me that few youths know how to make these grass baskets, which are specially woven with netted bottoms for sifting the dirt from root vegetables during harvest. And I have one up here if anybody wants to see it. This basketry process is endangered by the teaching of reed basketry in local schools, where children have been trained to make animal-shaped basketry which appeals to the international tourist market. More than a loss of an art form, the possible disappearance of Ichu basketry will deprive future agriculture lists of a zero-cost craft, which has been designed over generations to efficiently sift dirt from root vegetables and to withstand heavy use. You can, this is almost inflexible. It's a very, very sturdy form of basketry. It's a useful tool. The disappearance of so many traditional arts also inhibits the study of ancient craft technologies by archaeologists. I was able to work with Luis and take some videos, and this is just as zoomed in of Luis kind of working through some of the later lashings in the basket. As well as conservation, my ethnographic project aims to study this basketry production as a way of accessing the social organization, and especially modes of conversation and communication which happened during crafting. As an archaeologist, I'm interested in the first technologies used in the Taraka Peninsula. A setting which eventually grave rise to the Taripe Formative Complex of sunken ritual courts and the later expanse of Tiwanaku culture on the other side of Taraka Taripe, which would go on to inspire Inka and modern state Mithos and the Andean region. Understanding how contemporary basket makers observe their environment and how they discuss with their neighbors about micro-political relationships during basketry production can help us to model how early forms of craft production could have created arenas of political discourse. I believe this is a unique chance not only pursue ethnorearchaeological research, but even better yet, it can contribute to the conservation of an indigenous basketry making technique. My project will provide videos and images of elders speaking in Aymara about their experience as basket makers, their personal philosophies and ideas about the importance of crafting. And I plan to pursue the project as soon as possible because I hope that these are the experiences that are gonna give me a better chance to listen and discuss perspectives on technology and how things like the Sami quality can emerge during the process of dedicated labor. I also wanna work with elders to formulate operational sequences of their work, asking for their input and interpretation along the way, engaging in the co-authoring which Marisol de la Cadena suggests. These sequences will be useful for archeological analysis of basketry tools and production processes, but are also immediately beneficial for teacherless training pamphlets for schools and individual learners in Sharifa. This summer, I was also able to begin working on ceramic analysis technique using low-cost, high-resolution photography. Essentially, my plan is to study minute surface details for a form of semi-automated quantitative analysis using false-collar images generated through RTI, which is reflectance transformation imaging. Using these false-collar images, I will put them into cell counting software and begin to basically do things like PCA analysis or discrimination analysis and look at these surfacing techniques in finer detail. This summer, I was able to collect over 200 sets of photographs of early formative and middle formative ceramics from Sharifa. The RTI capture process entails a fixed camera and object with lights rotated between photographs and a reflective sphere, which is the round object you see in the photos, which shows a bright highlight spot. Similar to photogrammetry, which uses geometry to reconstruct a 3D model, RTI uses the sphericity of the sphere to construct a polynomial texture map, which is a static view, which is what we're looking at right now, which is a static view of an object with dynamic adjustable lighting. With high-resolution photography, this means we can re-examine photographed objects under dynamic lighting conditions, getting us one tiny step closer to being able to hold an object in hand without actually having it in hand. And also, and I feel this is very important, it lets us invite more collaborators to interpret our materials, especially remotely. The purpose of this study has been to expand the documentation and analysis of surfacing techniques beyond observational notation. When we put them on operational sequence diagrams, surface treatments on ceramics are frequently represented as just a single phase. However, when we study archeological ceramics, we see every stroke of a burnishing stone or a swipe of leather as discrete gestural units of time. Hence, the topography of various surfacing treatments actually signifies various intensities of time, if you think of it that way. And if we return briefly to the Sami Kamai discussion, we know that the intensity of labor dedicated to an object could be directly related to an investment by the maker of the Sami quality. In more general archeological research, this can also tell us about tooling and very specific processes of surface treatment. Expedient quantitative analysis of these various surface topographies then can enrich operational sequence diagrams. And it works really well with extensive attributional analysis, which has already been done in Toronto by Andy Roddick and Lee Steadman. And I'll continue to do with new materials as I'm able to get to them. More than going beyond description, improvements to the analysis of ceramic surface topography illuminates a creative environment in the past in the same way that the basket-making project hopes to give credence to the political impact of creative spaces. While often represented as a bubble and a diagram, the time spent burnishing ceramic is really super dense with action. It's a compressed time of repetitive and monotonous action where one gesture blurs into the next as easily as a former and the non-linearity of productive labor can be seen and heard. Burnished ceramics are like quilts in a knitting circle and they were audience to the kinds of social interactions which reinforce ties, circulate gossip, and hash out political grievance and agreement. Bringing surface topography into a larger project of attributional analysis and archeometry can help us understand the relationship between production of objects as well as political objectives. To be honest, it's really hard to avoid feeling that even with a slow translation, my archeological epistemologies have simply found a set of vivid similes and mnemonic devices for understanding indigenous explanations of the world. My goal here though is to operationalize these indigenous theories so that I'm not just trying to understand an indigenous position, but to let that indigenous position actually guide my own interpretations of the archeological record. As I'm sure everyone's seen, the most recent issue of the SAA archeological record is dedicated to archeologies of listening. The authors of the title article make a great point, which is my final point, that as archeologists we worked with empirical data and our strength and interpretation comes not from experimentation, but by reflecting on our own prior experiences. They suggest by listening to indigenous and community partners, we not only respect these people, but we actually impregnatically become better archeologists because we gain wider and wider insights on cultural and natural phenomenon which directly aid us in our methods of inference. This is why it's so important to me that ethnographic field work is the first step of at least my own archeological work. Overall, the gift reminds us that it's no gift is truly freely given. As an archeologist interested in incorporating indigenous theories and concepts at the beginning of my research, I know that I'm always receiving a gift every time that I'm the one talking. So even today, all of your attention is a gift. So thank you all very, very, very much. Yeah, questions, suggestions, comments, giant flaws. Please, everything, anything. June? RTI is an interesting toolkit and as somebody who's tried to look at the series of finishing techniques on ceramics, I was thinking, okay, first off, super cool. I love talking about that. And I'm also wondering, have you thought about how some of the data that you're generating from that process may lend itself to some descriptions to find the sites that you're at. Because as an archeologist, I think of pseudo-cut marks, straight marks, trampolines, and bones, right? Because you're working with ceramics, you're gonna have survivorship of your artifacts in ways that you wouldn't as an artist, right? And maybe some of the heavy duty stuff that looks like that ain't going to work, that's not that, that's not the point. Maybe there's, is there some? Yeah, yeah. Is there any work on using that? Not that I know of. RTI is generally used for sort of petroglyphs and it's actually very popular with lithocysts because it aids in sort of speeding up the drawing process for micro-seriations and things like that. But yeah, it would pick up taphenomic processes on just about any surface. And I have used it on one bone object, one that I actually suspect is something like a yowry, which is a type of needle used for making these kinds of baskets and it worked just fine on the bone. Although, because RTI basically captures curvature, because that's what it's really showing, if bones are always pretty curvy, so it's about doing a series of RTI over a whole surface. And I am hoping to teach a workshop here on RTI so I can talk way more about it and it's very simple, very approachable and basically a free technique. The software is free. Sorry, does that answer your, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah, of course. The RF has a set in mind. Yeah, and the RF has, yeah, we've invested, the RF has invested a lot in trying to get all of the tools and equipment for RTI so that we can all sort of figure out how this is gonna be useful to us. Any other questions or, Nico? Yeah. You mentioned that in the end exchange was, at least in contact periods, not thought that it had a market-based supply and demand basis. And I'm wondering if you thought about how maybe the mines, what is it? Sami and Kalei, yeah. It would continue to understand how it would work instead of supply and demand base. I've heard that it's, maybe, prices were fixed by condition. Yeah. Or by supply. Sort of like the trache system where there's equivalencies that are built up. Yeah. But then there's also, sometimes, like a baker's doesn't make a job like that. Oh, yeah. But yeah. Sort of, this is the key to a new team and the social relationships. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because Sami has been talked about as being sort of that thing which is in the object which makes it part of a landscape even if it moves away, it's sort of part of like Little Cusco and things like that, that there were parts of the Andean landscape that are actually distributed across the wider area. That I guess that could actually be another explanation for why, if they do have a market system, it's not a market system. It's like less than a minimum. Yeah. It's 5G. It's very hard. I think it's probably hard to come to a translation of their whatever exchange system they have, though, if you start with a market interpretation. I think maybe beginning, yeah, with Sami and Kamai and thinking about the fact that they have this sort of distributed agency, if we wanna call it that. Yeah, that would be actually an interesting thing to kind of tease out. Because it does mean that there's a continuous connection between the purchaser, the owner of an object and the maker slash landscaper that object came from. Yeah. Anybody else? Thank you guys. I'll let you all. Thank you.