Substance and materiality? The archaeology of Talensi medicine shrines and medicinal practices
نویسنده
چکیده
Talensi materia medica is varied, encompassing plant, mineral, and animal substances. Healing, medicines, and medicinal practices and knowledge can be shrine-based and linked with ritual practices. This is explored utilising ethnographic data and from an archaeological perspective with reference to future possibilities for research both on Talensi medicine and, by implication, more generally through considering the archaeology of Talensi medicine preparation, use, storage, spread, and disposal. It is suggested that configuring the archaeology of medicine shrines and practices more broadly in terms of health would increase archaeological visibility and research potential.
منابع مشابه
Introduction. Shrines, substances and medicine in sub-Saharan Africa: archaeological, anthropological, and historical perspectives
Whereas shrines in Africa, and to a lesser extent their links with medicine and healing, have been extensively studied by historians and anthropologists, they have been largely neglected by archaeologists. Focus has been placed upon palaeopathology when medicine is considered in archaeological contexts. Difficulties certainly exist in defining medicine shrines, substances and practices archaeol...
متن کاملIndigenous cosmology, art forms and past medicinal practices: towards an interpretation of ancient Koma Land sites in northern Ghana
The ancient cultural tradition in the middle belt region of northern Ghana, with its stone circle and house mounds, contains varied material culture. The unique contextual arrangements of the material culture within the stone circle mounds and the diverse ceramic art forms, as well as their ethnographic analogues in West Africa, indicate the mounds' association with past shrines that have multi...
متن کاملFREUD AND VOLKAN Psychoanalysis, group identities and archaeology
Recent discourse in archaeological theory has highlighted that the discipline’s approach to existence and materiality is firmly entrenched in traditions of modern thought (Thomas 1996, 2004; Tilley 2004). It has also been shown that archaeological methodology has a tendency to be used as an interpretative metaphor by other modern disciplines in the description of their own methodologies (Miller...
متن کاملThe Archaeology of Consumption
A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research pro...
متن کاملAdditive Archaeology: An Alternative Framework for Recontextualising Archaeological Entities
Additive manufacturing poses a number of challenges to conventional understandings of materiality, including the so-called archaeological record. In particular, concepts such as real, virtual, and authentic are becoming increasingly unstable, as archaeological artefacts and assemblages can be digitalised, reiterated, extended and distributed through time and space as 3D printable entities. This...
متن کامل