Violence (Other Keyword)
76-100 (114 Records)
This paper takes up the writings of Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari on the core premise that war is a driving sociological principle in societies that have successfully opposed the development of state organization. My first goal is an attempt at clarification: if predatory military exploits are involved in the consolidation of most, if not all, states, what did Clastres mean when, in contrast, he wrote about the centrifugal logic of the war machine in non-state societies? My second goal is to...
Osteological Evidence from a Civil War–Era Grave and Surgeon’s Pit in Colonial Williamsburg (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Individuals Known and Unknown: Case Studies from Two Burial Contexts at Colonial Williamsburg" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we report on the study of human skeletal remains recently discovered near a powder magazine in Williamsburg, VA, the site of a mass Confederate grave. Osteological analysis of four discrete burials and additional remains recovered from a nearby surgeon’s pit indicates that these...
Peoples and Crafts in Period IVB at Hasanlu, Iran
The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has had a long-standing interest in the archaeology of Iran. In 1956, Robert H. Dyson, Jr., began excavations south of Lake Urmia at the large mounded site of Hasanlu. Although the results of these excavations await final publication, the Hasanlu Special Studies series—of which this monograph is the fourth volume—describes and analyzes specific aspects of technology, style, and iconography. This volume describes a group of...
Physics and Ballistics of the “Rabbit Stick” or Straight-Flying Boomerang (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Perishable Weaponry Studies: Developing Perspectives from Dated Contexts to Experimental Analyses" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Straight-flying boomerangs—in North America commonly referred to as rabbit sticks—were used worldwide for both hunting and combat. When properly designed and implemented, the boomerang functions as an airfoil and gyroscope, slicing through atmosphere, generating lift, and...
The Pistol in the Privy: Myths and Contexts of Southern Italian Violence in the Anthracite Coalfields of Northeast Pennsylvania (2016)
The discovery of a revolver in the privy deposits of a home in a coal company town in the anthracite region of Northeast Pennsylvania evokes a long history of Southern Italian racialization as violent and vindictive by dominating groups. These imagined characteristics mobilized the privileged to fear, and thereby act to contain or exclude Southern Italian laborers wherever they lived. At the same time a transnational context reveals complex historical continuities when considered through...
The Poetics of Corpse Fragmentation and Processing in the Ancient Southwest (2016)
The bioarchaeological record in the ancient Southwest has an abundance of evidence of disarticulated remains to suggest a long history of body (corpse) processing and fragmentation. From AD 800 to the 1500s, various assemblages of processed human remains have been recovered. Published studies of these have argued for a wide range of motivations that could account for such assemblages including anthropophagy/cannibalism, massacres, torture, witch executions, ritualized violence, warfare, raiding...
Political Complexity and Gendered Violence in the Andes – A Bayesian Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of violence in the pre-modern past remains an enduring question in anthropological research. In this study, we investigate the potential relationship between sociopolitical organization and the frequency and type of violence experienced by adult males and females in Andean archaeological contexts. For this study we establish four broad...
Reconstructing Violence: A Multiscalar Approach to Cranial Trauma (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Continued Advances in Method and Theory for Commingled Remains" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When analyzing traumatic injury in highly commingled and fragmentary collections, interpreting violence can be particularly challenging as reconstructing the full extent of fractures in an individual is not possible, and not all traumatic injuries are indicative of violence. In these cases, cranial trauma can be the most...
Relational Empire: The Non-modern Violence of the Inka State (2016)
The use of “relational” approaches in archaeology seems much more prevalent in some contexts as compared to others. Particularly, it is most often invoked with respect to prehistoric hunter-foragers – that is, societies that are “politically non-complex” to use the classic archaeological terms. Perhaps as a result, violence is seldom discussed in the literature on relationality, unless to point out the contrasting violence of modernity itself. Yet for those of us who deal with indigenous...
Sacrifice as Politics, Killing as Identity: Regional Synthesis and New Evidence of Late Prehispanic Human Sacrifice in the Lambayeque Valley Complex, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ritual Violence and Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Andes: New Directions in the Field" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Diverse new understandings involving human sacrifice on the north coast of Peru have surfaced since 1994. In the Lambayeque Valley Complex on the northern north coast of Peru, an extensive and diachronic record of human sacrifice from several sites spanning nearly 400 individuals have been documented...
Saints as Warriors: Tlaxcalteca and Cholulteca “Smack Talk” during the Siege of Cholula (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the “Historia de Tlaxcala,” mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz de Camargo commemorates the first significant military endeavor between Tlaxcalan forces and the European soldiers under the command of Hernán Cortés. This study analyzes how Muñoz Camargo constructed the narrative of the siege and battle, and how he framed the Tlaxcalan victory as a...
Seeking Justice in Black Spaces: The Geography, Memory, and Power of Race Massacres in the United States (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology of Urban Dissonance: Violence, Friction, and Change" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Many urban centers bear the scars of anti-Black violence and race massacres. Predominately Black spaces have been especially susceptible to various forms of racial unrest at the hands of their white counterparts. Massacres such as those in the Snowtown neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island in 1831 and the...
Sites of Difficult Memory: The Haciendas of Chimborazo, Ecuador (2015)
From the 17th century until the land reforms of the last fifty years, hacienda agriculture dominated the highland region surrounding Chimborazo, Ecuador. Many of the central building complexes of these operations now stand as ruins on the landscape. Through interviews, historical research, and site survey, I explore the role that these ruins play as silent witnesses to a difficult past for rural indigenous communities today.
The Social Life of Crash Sites: Understanding World War II Sites in Context in the Search for Missing Air Crew (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Fulfilling a Nation’s Promise: The Search, Recovery, and Accounting Efforts of DPAA and Its Partners" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological sites are only rarely preserved as pristine moments in time, unaltered since the site was formed. More often, they are a continuous production, forming a part of the social and cultural landscape of the surrounding area. In this paper, we draw upon Appadurai’s idea of the...
Specific Skeletal Injuries as a Proxy for Domestic Violence (2016)
The prevalence of violence in past societies is generally assessed through observable skeletal trauma. Common contexts of violence vary from culture to culture, and differences in acceptable forms of violence can be evident after documenting the different shapes, locations, and stages of healing of injuries. Contemporary cross-cultural studies show the physical effects of household violence primarily display on the middle third of the face in female victims, can commonly cause concomitant...
The Spiro Panoply: An Examination, Structural Analysis, and Hypothetical Re-creation of Middle Mississippian Defensive Equipment and Weapon Systems (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With the recognition that violence, warfare, and trophy display within the North American Southeast was endemic during the Mississippian Cultural Period, an in-depth analysis of the equipment used by warring groups is now necessary. By examining the “Conquering Warrior” and associated human effigy pipes from the Great Mortuary at Spiro Mounds and...
Subjectification and the Archaeology of Violence: The 19th century Anti-Chinese Movement in San Jose, California (2015)
Communal violence is often central to subjectification and the process of creating and sustaining social difference. Preliminary results of archival studies and archaeological research trace the relationship between violence and subject formation among participants of the anti-Chinese movement in 19th century San Jose, which enacted campaigns of harassment and direct violence against Chinese immigrant and Chinese American residents of the city. What material practices and social performances...
Surveillance at Ancient Hillforts of the Titicaca Basin, Southern Peru: Insights into Social Dynamics and Defensive Strategies (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we model visibility and movement in and around ancient hillforts or pukaras across the highlands of southern Peru. During the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE), communities moved to hilltops where houses were often tightly packed together within the confines of large defensive walls. The...
Tanks of Vermont: Using 3D Imaging of Oversized Artifacts and Oral Histories to Build Community Engagement (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Capturing and Sharing Vermont’s Past: 3D Imaging as a Tool for Undergraduate Research and Community Engagement" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of 3D imaging within archaeology is often focused on the modestly sized objects and artifacts that form the basis of most museum or research collections. With the appropriate instrument, however, even very large objects can be effectively imaged and used in both...
A Tenuous Prize: Archaeology of the Inka Conquest of Northern Highland Ecuador (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The numerous Inka forts in northern highland Ecuador, more than reported from most other imperial provinces, suggest preoccupations with the region and its inhabitants. The Barbacoan-speaking locals were indeed powerful and a potentially difficult conquest, as attested to by...
Thirteenth-Century Villages and the Depopulation of the Northern San Juan Region by Pueblo Peoples (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Research, Education, and American Indian Partnerships at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The initial 40 years of research conducted by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center included several excavation projects that focused on a primary stated research goal of the center: discover why Pueblo peoples completely and permanently vacated the northern San Juan region late in the...
To Fight or Not to Fight: Comparing Evidence of Violence on Human Skeletal Remains at Sites in and around Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres Region (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intent of this presentation is to compare patterns of violence on human skeletal remains recovered from archaeological sites in the San Juan Basin associated with Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region in the US Southwest. The Chaco sites date to AD 850–1300, while the Mimbres sites date to AD 650–1300. Bioarchaeological signatures of violence on the...
The Tumultuous Times: The Shifting Alliances of Caracol Monarchs in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Rise and Apogee of the Classic Maya Kaanu’l Hegemonic State at Dzibanche" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The most extensive historical record of Caracol was produced under the reign of Tutum Yohl K’inich Tz’uutz’ II (formerly known as K’an II / Ruler V), who reigned from AD 618 to 658. In addition to outlining his life and deeds, as well as those of his father Yajawte’ K’inich Tz’uutz’ II (a.k.a. Lord Water /...
Updated Perspectives on Sennacherib’s Siege at Tel Lachish (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From gypsum reliefs that once decorated the walls of the Assyrian capital at Nineveh, archaeologists know that Sennacherib’s army laid waste to the city of Lachish, Judah (now Israel) in 701 BC. There remains no consensus on how these events unfolded, but many researchers agree that the Lachish reliefs were intended to serve as both historical record and...
Violence and Selected Funerary Treatment: Insights from a Collective Open Tomb of the Upper Nepeña Drainage, Peru (AD 1300–1500) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent PARAMa project undertook the excavation of several open sepulcher funerary contexts in the Upper Nepeña Drainage, among which two structures were thoroughly excavated. Their content, predominantly skeletonized and partially mummified human remains, were analyzed, representing the first systematic...