inequality (Other Keyword)
26-41 (41 Records)
Since the 1980s, archaeologists have measured economic inequality by borrowing the Gini index from economics, and applying it to the archaeological record in various ways. Burial assemblages were the earliest targets, and more recent efforts have expanded to house sizes, areas of agricultural fields, and household possessions. Each of these sources provides potentially enlightening information about the distribution of wealth within an ancient community. Each source has its advantages and...
Life after Sugar: an Archaeology of the First Generation Post-emancipation in St. Peter’s Parish, Montserrat (2017)
In the first generation after emancipation Montserrat and its residents experienced exceptional difficulties. As the society transitioned from a sugar-based economy, former slaves, estate owners, and colonial authorities collectively struggled with the devastating effects of man-made and natural disasters, including a major earthquake in 1843, and a wide range of social, economic, and legal problems. This paper examines archaeological and historical evidence from St Peter’s Parish, the...
Material elaboration and monumentality: Mortuary beads, pastoralists, and social innovation in northwest Kenya (2017)
Megalithic architecture appeared suddenly in northwest Kenya 5000 years ago in tandem with the earliest pastoralists in the region. As Lake Turkana’s levels dropped, these people built "pillar sites" – massive feats of labor and coordination that represent one of the earliest instances of monumentality in Africa – in a brief explosion of material and architectural elaboration. The burials associated with these pillar sites are highly ornamented, with thousands of beads made from stone, bone, and...
Measures of Inequality in the Mississippian Heartland (2016)
Cahokia, the earliest and largest Mississippian (A.D. 1050–1400) mound complex, is situated in the American Bottom of Illinois. It is widely considered to be the center of a regionally integrated polity complete with subsidiary centers, specialized settlements, and rural farmsteads. Investigations at Cahokia proper and in the surrounding countryside over the past 50 years have provided a wealth of data concerning settlement layout, structure size and shape, and the differential distribution of...
Measuring household wealth using mound accumulation rates in Skagafjörður, North Iceland (2017)
Characterizing inter-household inequalities has long been a fundamental task of archaeology, but a fine-tuned measure of household wealth is often troubled by the inability to account for time or demographics in the archaeological record. This project tests the ways that Iceland, settled by Norse populations between A.D. 870 and 930, provides a temporally-sensitive mode of measuring household wealth through average rates of midden and architectural accumulations while also providing a context...
Modeling Intra-site Spatial Structure Helps Identify Inequality Among Enslaved Households at Monticello Plantation. (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For decades archaeologists studying households occupied by enslaved people in North America and the Caribbean have attempted to identify swept yards using archaeological evidence. This paper builds on this work. I offer a model of how yard maintenance predicts spatial covariation between artifact density and size. I also offer a R-based workflow, available on Github, for identifying...
A Modern World Archaeology: Two Decades Later (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Few have shaped the field of historical archaeology like Chuck Orser. His dedication to the discipline, contributions to archaeological theory and practice, and prolific and growing list of publications are foundations for scholarship in the field. Despite his evolving interests, Orser remains...
Mumun Period Households and the Rise of Inequality in Korea (2015)
In the Jinju area of South Korea, social inequality first emerged during the Mumun Period (1060 – 340 cal. B.C.), during which permanent agricultural villages were also established. Excavations in the last two decades have uncovered close to 15 of these settlements, but the process of emergent inequality during the Mumun Period is just beginning to be understood. This poster provides results from the first systematic study of households from the Jinju area that intersects this important period....
My Collegial Interactions With Mary Beaudry (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "“Historical Archaeology with Canon on the Side, Please”: In Honor of Mary C. Beaudry (1950-2020)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Mary Beaudry was hired at Boston University in 1980, shortly after I was hired at University of Massachusetts/Boston in 1978. We became friendly colleagues, shared drives to conferences and worked together in several professional capacities, including as founding members of the...
Poor and Poorly? The archaeology of inequality in a Nordic welfare state (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Poverty And Plenty In The North", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Finland is a modern Nordic welfare state and has a coherent national narrative about poverty or rather the inexistence of it. In this paper we examine a community called Vaakunakylä that was located in Oulu, Finland during the post-war reconstruction period (1947-1987). The community that lived there was subject to eviction from their homes...
Spatial and Temporal Variability in Hohokam Inequality (2016)
This paper will investigate synchronic and diachronic inequality among the Hohokam of southern Arizona. The Hohokam were an irrigation dependent, middle range society that occupied the low Sonoran Desert from approximately AD 500 to 1500. Over this impressive temporal span there were substantial changes, gradual and punctuated, to organizational systems, demographic pressure, and subsistence bases. The analysis presented in this paper will draw upon available data sets from substantial CRM...
Terraforming, Monumentality and Long Term Practice in the Coast Salish World (2016)
The archaeological record of the southern Gulf Islands of coastal British Columbia provides evidence of deliberate and long-term construction of coastal landforms over the last 4500 years. Local landscapes were altered, modified and managed in the service of production, but the implications of such practices for the construction of place, of inequality, and of political networks are profound. I document the magnitude and extent of landscape construction spatially, focusing on quantifying...
Tonics, Bitters, and Other Curatives: An Intersectional Archaeology of Health and Inequality in Rural Arkansas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Health and Inequality in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Excavations at Hollywood Plantation, a 19th century plantation in southeast Arkansas, resulted in thousands of fragments of medicine bottles. From tonics increasingly marketed to women to bitters and syrups produced to treat all types of ailments, patent medicine bottles provide a lens into changing ideas about health and healing and...
Urban Commoner Households: (In)Equality and Daily Life at Aventura (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cities are locations of diverse human interaction where persons from different families and social affiliations can gather, exchange goods, and participate in community events. However, the management of these diverse interactions and activities requires social and political systems that do not value the...
Variation in the Lithic Technological Organization Accompanying Household Expansion at Housepit 54, Bridge River site, British Columbia (2015)
The degree of preservation of Housepit 54 at the Bridge River site located in south-central British Columbia provides a rare look at a long series of intact occupational floors within a single pithouse. As data collection continues, a vast number of opportunities emerge to examine behavioral variation at the household level. During the 2014 field season, excavation revealed a household transition that reflected shifts in the organization of space within the household. Changes included...
Village Aggregation and Early Cultural Developments on the Canadian Plateau: a case study from Keatley Creek (2017)
Understanding when and under what conditions aggregation into larger communities with large corporate house organizations, socioeconomic inequalities and specialized ritual structures occurred has been a central theoretical issue in various regions of archaeological investigations. Perhaps the biggest bone of contention in current theorising is whether these transitions occur when hunter/gatherers accepted claims to privilege on the part of some individuals by consensus to deal with community...