Relational Ontologies in Archaeological Practice: A Perspective from Animal Matter in Teotihuacan

Recorded: April 11, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: Sugiyama, Nawa. “Relational Ontologies in Archaeological Practice: A Perspective from Animal Matter in Teotihuacan,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 11, 2025).

by Nawa Sugiyama (University of California, Riverside)

With the animal turn and vibrant discourses on relational ontologies in the anthropological literature, archaeologists, too, are striving to find ways to acknowledge and integrate Indigenous knowledge systems while maintaining methodologically and contextually grounded interpretations of material culture. In this talk, I contextualize the use of relational ontologies within the framework of a case study from the ancient metropolis of Teotihuacan. I propose that multi-archaeometry methodologies allow us to go beyond understanding subjugated agencies by recognizing active, international, and contextually contingent socialites of
animals in the formation of ceremonial landscapes. As articulated by the Mexican historian and philosopher of religions of Mesoamerica, Alfredo López Austin, relational ontologies were part of the “hard nucleus” that provided continuities despite radical cultural, economic, and ideological ruptures throughout past and present Mesoamerican communities. With enhanced methods to bring specific corporeal interactions to life, archaeologists should strive to provide historically and contextually contingent, data-driven, inter-personally centered, and socially engaged reconstructions of ancient landscapes.

About the Speaker

Dr. Nawa Sugiyama is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside and an anthropological archaeologist specializing topics pertaining to the construction of ritualized landscapes, human-animal interaction, and the processes and consequences of urbanization in Mesoamerica. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Harvard University in 2014, after which she become a Peter Buck Post-doctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution and Assistant Professor at George Mason University. She is co-director of Project Plaza of the Columns Complex at the UNESCO world heritage site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, where her team is excavating at a central civic-administrative complex in the ceremonial core of the ancient metropolis.