Social and Political Organization (Other Keyword)
126-150 (261 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations in Plazas A and B of the site core at Pacbitun indicate that initial occupation began in the early Middle Preclassic period (900–600 BC). At this time, a small agricultural community was established in Plaza B beginning with a few domestic structures built just above bedrock. These early domiciles would also function as workshops for the...
The Importance of Specialized Use Sites in the Settlement History of Iceland (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Climate and Heritage in the North Atlantic: Burning Libraries" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sandvík, located in the Westfjords of Iceland, seems to have been a seasonally utilized site focused primarily on winter fishing and fish processing. The site is situated directly on the coast, quite near to the main farm of Bær, and dates to very early in the settlement period of Iceland, which began around AD 877. Even...
Importance of U-2 Aerial Imagery of Iron Age Cities in the Middle East (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With this research, I hope to digitally reproduce the high-resolution U-2 photographs by specially processing my photographs of the imagery using photogrammetic methods, such as Agisoft Metashape to produce 3D surface models. With these models, I will deduce what implications the structures and features visible in the imagery and models have in association...
Incipient Pottery Practices and Divergent Complexities in the Late Archaic Southeast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pottery technology has long played a central role in evolutionary narratives of early complex societies, most often through its perceived link to other cultural benchmarks such as sedentism, farming, and regionalization. Archaeological research over the past few decades, however, has largely discredited simplistic and monolithic accounts...
Individual, Family, Site, 'Community' or Region? - Thinking Across Spatial and Social Scale in Prehistoric Laos and Thailand (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistory is made up of individuals and families going about their daily lives. Surely, no one in NE Thailand 3000 years ago was thinking deeply about how to craft a ‘state’ from small semi-agricultural villages. However, it can also be argued that large scale social and technological change and Asia-wide...
Inscribing Behaviors on Oracle Turtle Plastrons: A New Method to Analyze Tributary Networks of Late Shang China (c. 1250 BCE–1046 BCE) (2018)
Processed from turtle shells and bovid scapulae, oracle bones were massively exploited by the ruling house of the late Shang Dynasty for divination. As opposed to traditional scholarship that holds primary interest in inscriptions engraved on these bones, I consider late Shang divination in entirety as a technological process that proceeds from the preparation and delivery of bone material via tributary networks all the way to bones’ after-use discard into pits. By switching the attention to the...
Institutional Dimensions of Northern Iroquoian Confederacies and Implications for Contact Period Geopolitics (2024)
This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Confederacies have been under-theorized in the social sciences in comparison to discourses focused on state development as per socio-evolutionary paradigms. Confederacies do not serve to govern so much as to coordinate. This paper explores the practices, institutions, and ideologies utilized by late...
An Introduction to Archaeology at Holtun, Guatemala (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Holtun: Investigations at a Preclassic Maya Center" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeological site of Holtun, Guatemala has been documented as an intermediate-sized Maya center with occupation spanning the Middle Preclassic through Terminal Classic periods. The site is situated approximately 35 km southwest of Tikal and 12.3 km to the south of Yaxha. The formal site consists of a monumental epicenter built...
Is That Awl? Olmec Jade Artifacts as Elite Tools, Ornaments, and Inalienable Goods (2018)
Recent research has re-identified certain enigmatic Gulf Coast Olmec greenstone artifacts as elite versions of textile-making tools. These artifacts, which include Middle Formative picks, figural celts, clamshell and plaque pendants, and objects designated as "spoons," were likely used by elites as both functional objects and high-status adornment, as illustrated in the contemporary sculpture. Most examples of these artifacts are found in caches and graves of distant and/or later civilizations,...
Islands of Ideology: Exploring Group Formation in Hawaiʻi and Sāmoa (2024)
This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social consent was essential to promote cooperation and group identity. Because of disciplinary attention to top-down processes of power accumulation and political classification, how social notions of social consent in middle-range societies were modified and diversified is poorly understood. The societies...
Jade, Scepters, and Seats of Power: Symbols of Authority on the Central American Coast, 300 BC-AD 300 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper documents a widespread shift during the period from 300 BC-AD 300 toward symbolism associated with authority and rulership along the Pacific coast, throughout the region spanning between southern Chiapas and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. During this period, several notable changes in burial patterns,...
Kinship, Clanship, and the Incorporation of Newcomers in Northern Iroquoian Society (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we consider how institutions of social relatedness played crucial roles in Huron-Wendat society and how categories of biological and fictive kinship (e.g., lineages, clans, nations) structured processes of social integration, political affiliation, and adoption. We argue that...
Komkom What May: The Ancient Maya Kingdom of Komkom in Time and Place (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Making and Breaking Boundaries in the Maya Lowlands: Alliance and Conflict across the Guatemala–Belize Border" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Painted and carved pictorial pottery of the Classic Maya (250-850 CE) served primarily as ostentatious serving vessels at feasts and other principal celebrations. The vessels were masterful creations by accomplished artisans and are, for the most part, individualistic...
The Körös Regional Archaeological Project, 20 Years of (Mostly Successful) Collaboration (2018)
The Körös Regional Archaeological Project was established in 1998 as a collaborative, multidisciplinary, research project focused on the later prehistory of the Körös region on the Great Hungarian Plain in the Carpathian Basin. Over the last two decades, the project has attempted to build upon the success of previous ambitious projects in the region by emphasizing not only the collaborative nature of the research endeavor but also by incorporating a robust training component into the project. In...
Large Centralized Fired-Clay Cooking Stoves of Communal Households on Marajoara Mounds at the Mouth of the Amazon c. AD 400–1100 (2018)
Rarely does the New World a thropological literature mention the existence of large centralized, multi-unit fired clay cooking structures of some prehistoric or recent indigenous Amazonian households. Yet these large, highly patterned features have been informative for archaeology from several points of view. Their existence and common presence as permanent structures built into the floors of prehistoric mound sites on Marajo Island have demonstrated that the mounds they occur in had sizeable,...
Late Classic Marketplace Pottery Exchange in the Three Rivers Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Prehispanic Maya Marketplace Investigations in the Three Rivers Region of Belize: First Results" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The understanding of Maya marketplaces has long been hindered by the lack of archaeological data to support their identification. The ceramic data presented here serves as one aspect of an overarching project that uses a configurational approach and a set of cross-cultural marketplace...
Late Pre-Columbian Craft and Community at the Weeden Island Site (8Pi1) (2018)
In the past, as in the present, political-economic relationships occur at multiple social scales: for instance, we recognize regional relationships of dominance or tribute, degrees of dependence or rivalry between trading partner communities, and patterns of collaboration or competition between neighboring households. Enduring inequalities may become established at any of these levels at different times. This paper will discuss the local organization of residential communities in the context of...
Life on the Margins: Eastern Oklahoma’s Arkansas Drainage between 1300 and 1500 CE (2018)
Beginning around 1100 CE, residents of the eastern Oklahoma Arkansas River drainage built mounds, shared elaborate mortuary rituals, and on some level participated in a maize-based agricultural system. These aspects of the broader Mississippian pattern were centered at Spiro Mounds. Beginning in 1300 CE, people began abandoning the mound sites on the margins of the Southern Plains. As climate conditions worsened in the fifteenth century, the residents of the Arkansas drainage adopted Plains...
Linear Enamel Hypoplasia: An Analysis of Health Disparities Between the Early Intermediate Period and Middle Horizon of Nasca, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There has been an abundance of research on the Nasca culture and linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) separately. However, there is no literature specifically on Nasca and LEH analysis comparing the Early Intermediate Period (EIP) and the Middle Horizon period (MH). The research detailed here shows there are evident disparities in LEH between Nasca individuals...
Living in the City of Naachtun (Guatemala): A Perspective from Urban Neighborhoods (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological investigations carried out since 2011 at the site of Naachtun provide series of data useful to draw with sufficient details, the historical trajectory of this Maya Classic regional capital located between Tikal and Calakmul. Starting its development with the construction of...
Living on the Edge: Alternative Network Models for Socio-spatial Analysis in Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "People and Space: Defining Communities and Neighborhoods with Social Network Analysis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies using network analysis in archaeology seek to understand the interactions and structures that defined past societies. Such approaches are based on graph theoretic models that are simplifications of reality used to conceptualize and describe relationships, either qualitatively or...
Local Actions and Long-Distance Interactions: Challenging the Paradigm for the Emergence of Social Complexity on Cyprus during the Bronze Age (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mediterranean Archaeology: Connections, Interactions, Objects, and Theory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex social networks or social complexity emerges from the actions and interactions of people as they pass information, goods and services. During the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Cyprus, it has been hypothesized that two actions and interactions are particularly important for...
Looting Enigmas and Contextual Narratives at La Corona (2023)
This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over two dozen hieroglyphic panels looted in the 1960s from the site of La Corona, formerly known as “Site Q,” ended up in private collections around the globe. Some of these panels are featured in the Grolier Catalog. While the monuments have provided extensive information on the role...
Lunar Power in Ancient Maya Cities (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the sun set on the horizon, ancient city dwellers would have felt the cooler air, heard cicadas’ songs, and perhaps tasted a late-night snack. Their vision, however, would have suffered the most as dusk turned to night and some form of illumination was necessary to see others, carry on activities, or get to bed....
Maize’s Role in the Diets of Late Prehistoric People Living in the Prairie Peninsula (2018)
Population aggregation and shifts in material culture of the Late Prehistoric Eastern Woodlands (AD900-1100) has often been linked to the increase in the importance of maize in the human diet. In the Midwest, the development of distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures (e.g., Oneota, Langford and Middle Mississippian) has often been connected to assumed differences in maize consumption. A commonly used model is that increased complexity in social structures result from, and/or are...