Social value (Other Keyword)
1-3 (3 Records)
This case study explores how food consumption in the military garrison of San Juan de Puerto Rico played a role in the negotiation of status and identities during the Spanish colonial period. Since defense of the territories was the primary task, the military tended to have priority to the access of exotic foodstuffs, such as wheat products. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico was quickly relegated to the margins of the Spanish Empire and legal ships ceased to arrive in a constant mode. Thus, we want to...
From Raw Material to Symbol of Social Value: Obsidian Movement in the Palaeolithic (2015)
Recent research has demonstrated the extensive use of obsidian throughout the Palaeolithic in all the areas where obsidian sources were available at the time. Further analysis revealed that obsidian covered a wide range of distances on the Palaeolithic landscape but in the majority of cases its movement was linked to long distances, i.e. ≥100 km. This surprising conclusion cannot be satisfactorily explained on purely functional terms. Obsidian’s physical properties could have been the primary...
Social Function, Semiotic Meaning & Community Identity or Sometimes a Pot is not just a Pot (2017)
The spread of ‘Palace Ware’, an 8th–7th century BCE drabware, across the Neo-Assyrian imperial landscape coincides with the annexation of territory and establishment of vassal states and buffer zones throughout the ancient Near East. Consequently, Palace Ware has been considered ‘imperial’ material culture and equated with imperial identity. This unilateral, top-down interpretation reduces material expression of complex interregional, intercultural interaction into either imposition or...