Introduction

This book explores an ontological approach to bioarchaeology. In adopting Karen Barad’s diffractive onto-epistemological approach, I consider how concepts shape the way we characterize lived experiences as relational situated encounters. I also draw on Deleuze’s notion of multiplicities to reimage an individual’s worldly encounters as immersed experiences. Rather than describing what a body is, immersed experiences portray how a body’s multiple on-going relationships characterize what it does. Viewed as configurations of processes and events, this diffractive approach identifies how crucial moments emerge as tipping points. To illustrate this approach, I draw on my earlier work at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, a fourteenth century Ancestral Puebloan village. I explore how individuals were constituted as different kinds of persons, and how life at Arroyo Hondo was entangled with and experienced through the lens of Tewa cosmology.