heterarchy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carole Crumley.

As recent events demonstrate, power can manifest entirely outside the framework of state hierarchies and beyond their control. Beginning with the premise that tension between competition and cooperation exists in all human societies, we must explore the ways rules and norms permit or deny each, and how both interact with history and changing conditions to forge institutions. Today, new ways to stabilize societies and reduce conflict must be found. One of the most important conditions for...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Wake. Lana Martin. Tomas Mendizabal.

Recent field and laboratory archaeological findings in Bocas del Toro, Panama offer data that changes and amplifies our understanding of the prehistory of the region. Detailed paleoethnobotanical study, further zooarchaeological examination, preliminary ceramic thin-section analysis, and continuing ceramic analysis have all produced results that call in to question entrenched assumptions concerning the timing of settlement, the nature of the subsistence economy, trade, exchange and cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Wenke.

Of all the ancient states, the concept of heterarchy would seem to be least applicable to ancient Egypt.There, according to traditional interpretations, successive polities in the 3rd Millennium BC successfully monopolized power and authority by means of increasingly elaborate and hierarchically- arranged administrative structures and functions. But recent analyses and evidence suggest that state did not maintain absolute control at all times and in all areas of the state, particularly with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

The emergence of sociopolitical complexity, and its connections to other developments such as changing subsistence and domestic mobility, has been a central theme of archaeology for over a century. Mesoamerica has been no exception to this trend, and scholars of pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America have scrutinized socioeconomic correlates of changing political integration and centralization. One concept central to this research has been that of hereditary hierarchical inequality. In fact,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Janet Levy.

When archaeologists, largely led by Carole Crumley, began applying the concept of heterarchy to prehistoric contexts, the focus was on social organization writ large. We generally used heterarchy to debate, illuminate, and/or clarify models of non-egalitarianism, stratification, and hierarchy. The concept seems to have come out of analyses of 20th century political systems. Some archaeological scholars of heterarchy have diversified into discussions of other aspects of human experience, such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piyawit Moonkham. Andrew Duff. Nattasit Srinurak.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of social heterarchy was first incorporated as an alternative approach to examining the sociopolitical organization of early settlements in the Southeast Asia region, particularly pre-state societies. However, applications of heterarchy are somewhat limited to archaeological research on social development,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese. Linda Manzanilla.

The political organization of Teotihuacan continues to be unknown. While some researchers see evidence for a powerful centralized hierarchy, others argue for a more collective form of government. We created an abstract computer model of hypothetical social relations among neighborhood-level representatives to show that such a distributed political network could in principle have been sufficient for globally optimal decision making, as long as there are community rituals and sections of the city...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Burham.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of Ceibal, Guatemala, became a preeminent center in the Pasión Region of the southern lowlands over the Preclassic period (ca. 950 BCE-350 CE). During the latter centuries of this period, minor temple complexes were built at regular intervals within the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth DeMarrais.

This presentation explores landscapes of heterarchy, investigating the ways that past peoples inhabited a south Andean landscape. In the northern Calchaquí Valley of Argentina, before the Inkas, power relations were predominantly decentralized and spatially extensive. As a consequence, lived experience, the built environment, and the wider landscape both constituted and reproduced a distinctive social order and cultural logic. Using data from regional survey, I argue first for a habitus that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Becker.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When past peoples congregated to form complex societies, a question arises as to under what circumstances would heterarchical, reciprocal labor be emphasized over top-down hierarchical configurations? In the Central Andes of South America, modern indigenous people practice reciprocal labor with groupings organized around family...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claira Ralston. Debra Martin. Maryann Calleja.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pueblo groups living in the Kayenta region of northern Arizona differ remarkably from their contemporaries in adjacent regions. At Mesa Verde and Chaco to the northeast and southeast respectively, there is compelling evidence for rigid hierarchical and political systems of trade, governance, and decision-making that generated...