Social and Political Organization (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of the Virgin Branch Puebloan Region" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social complexity in prehispanic societies within the North American Southwest has been studied through a variety of research avenues. Among the Virgin Branch people within the Moapa Valley of southern Nevada, archaeologists have pursued this topic through the study of architecture, burials and associated grave goods, and exchange...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Perez.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Social complexity in pre-Hispanic societies within the North American Southwest has been studied through a variety of research avenues. Among the Virgin Branch people within the Moapa Valley of southern Nevada, archaeologists have pursued this topic through the study of architecture, burials and associated grave goods, and exchange networks. Among Virgin...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rissa Trachman. J. Alex Canterbury.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The current research in the Dos Hombres civic ceremonial center utilizes the lens of "everyday life" in order to understand the internal ritual, economic, social, and ideological activities of this ancient city, as well as how it interacted with the surrounding household hinterlands, and the socio-political and economic role this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Agathe Cadieux.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Liguria, Italy, offers an ideal setting to study how hunter-gatherers adapted to the climatic, social and political changes of the transition to the Neolithic. Additionally, Liguria is an interesting region to study this question since it was one of the first regions of the Western Mediterranean to be colonized by Neolithic agriculturalists and thus...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tekla Schmaus. Bryan Hanks. David Reich. Margaret Judd. Andrei Epimakhov.

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient DNA studies have increased exponentially in recent years and have had tremendous impact on our understanding of early genomic patterning in many regions of the world. The vast Eurasian steppe zone has not been overlooked in these important breakthroughs. Several recent studies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stryder Hellewell.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Bronze Age (LBA) Greece, c. 1200 B.C.E. was a period of fiery transformation. During this final phase of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaean civilization was at its height. Greece was comprised of highly stratified palace-states and city-states, each with its own government structure. To understand the nature of the political decline experienced widely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Michael Biggie. Victoria Izzo. Julie Hoggarth. Rafael Guerra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditionally anthropologists envisioned ritual as playing a functional role in the formation and ongoing cohesion of ancient complex societies. More recent perspectives consider ritual to represent a powerful tool of resistance, and therefore pivotal not just to the integration, but also the disintegration of polities. Situations in which a higher order...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Poston. Maria Belen Mendez Bauer.

This is an abstract from the "Preclassic Maya Social Transformations along the Usumacinta: Views from Ceibal and Aguada Fénix" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Tiradero is located next to the San Pedro River, a distributary of the Usumacinta River, in Tabasco, Mexico and contains evidence of occupation during the Late Preclassic and Terminal Classic periods. At the site, a Middle Formative Chiapas E-Group pattern is consistent with those...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenichiro Tsukamoto.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the result of excavations at the palace of El Palmar, Campeche, Mexico. During the 2022 field season, we conducted horizontal and stratigraphic excavations at Structure S21-2, which closes the south end of the palace. With four other range structures, Structure S21-1 forms Plaza G, the most restricted gathering space at the site. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Berrey.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early complex societies of Central America and northern South America were once widely recognized for their organizational and cultural diversity. Since that time, greater emphasis has been placed on their shared cultural traits, as revealed through genetic and linguistic data and patterns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Lawrence. Valentina Tumolo. Pertev Basri.

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigating how different forms of inequality arose and were sustained is key to understanding the emergence of complex social systems, and archaeology has much to contribute to this discussion. In this paper we investigate inequality in ancient Southwest Asia using a variety of proxies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kenneth Cannon. Houston Martin. Molly Cannon.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Immigrant Chinese workers represented the dominant work force in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad (1863-1869). The archaeological record they left behind provides an important snapshot of the lives of these largely male work camps in the isolated desert of northwestern Utah. Funded by the National Park Service’s Underrepresented Community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George J. Micheletti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya Preclassic round structures without a superstructure are generally believed to have functioned as performance stages, denoting their role as social settings. However, the meager sample size of identified round structures and the limited exposure of their surroundings have led to socio-contextual and socio-cultural incongruencies, particularly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian K. Madsen. Jette Arneborg. Ian Simpson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Norse that settled in Greenland between c. AD 985-1450 depended greatly on the harvesting of local to regional Arctic marine resources for both subsistence and oversees trade. However, the mechanics and organization around this important marine economy have only left a limited imprint in the archaeological record, which is dominated by evidence of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jemima Georges.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nixtun-Ch’ich’ in Petén, Guatemala was heavily occupied in the Middle Preclassic (800-300 BC) and Late Preclassic (300 BC-AD 200) periods. The site was abandoned in the Early Classic period (AD 200-600), then reoccupied in the Late/Terminal Classic (AD 600-930) and Postclassic period (AD 930-1525). Excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar.

This is an abstract from the "New Advances in Cusco Archaeology: From the Formative to the Late Horizon" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Qeuña Sondor andesite outcrop is 16 km to the north of Cusco at 4300 m. Stone from here was first used to construct the Inka royal estate of Caquia Xaquixahuana (JuchuyQosqo), associated with Viracocha Inka. Small blocks from here were also used in some of the earliest Inka andesite constructions in Cuzco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Venicia Slotten.

This is an abstract from the "Repositioning Altar de Sacrificios on the Ancient Maya Landscape" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Macrobotanical samples collected from Altar de Sacrificios that represent a range of time periods, from the Late Preclassic to the Terminal Classic, examine the linkage between the emergence of political elites and disparities in the quality of life in ancient Maya society. The archaeobotanical samples from various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Kellett.

This paper examines how Late Intermediate Period or Chanka phase (~AD 1000-1400) communities were formed during a period of overlapping social and environmental risks in the Chanka heartland of Andahuaylas. In particular, the paper considers how aggregated hilltop communities formed and functioned under new social and economic conditions. Recent archaeological research from Andahuaylas suggests that the majority of aggregated Chanka phase ridgetop sites were likely inhabited by neither...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Wedemeyer. Arthur Joyce. Jeffery Brzezinski. Sarah Barber.

The Terminal Formative period (150BCE-250CE) in Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico was a time of urbanization and increasing political interaction. The Terminal Formative included the emergence of an urban center at the site of Río Viejo, which may have extended political influence over surrounding communities. During this period, on the coast of Oaxaca, ceramic figurines were a ubiquitous medium for expression and identity in political/cultural exchanges. By comparing ceramic figurines from the site of Rio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A simulation model of Teotihuacan’s hypothetical collective government has shown that a highly distributed network of leaders could have been effective at ensuring social coordination in the city by means of consensus formation. The model makes a strong prediction: it indicates that this collective mode of government would have been most effective in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

The Teuchitlán culture is one of many cultures in West Mexico during the Late Formative to Classic periods (300 B.C. – 450/500 AD) that share in the tradition of burying some of their dead in shaft and chamber tombs. The Teuchitlán culture is noteworthy among their contemporaries for the large number of circular ceremonial buildings concentrated around the Tequila volcano and surrounding valleys. Los Guachimontones, located on the southern side of the volcano, is the largest site in the region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bayman.

This is an abstract from the "Why Platform Mounds? Part 2: Regional Comparisons and Tribal Histories" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Interpreting the political economies of early complex societies that lacked texts is a profoundly difficult challenge for anthropological archaeology. Such models compel archaeologists to examine material evidence of agricultural intensification, community organization, craft specialization, monumental construction,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Shiratori.

This is an abstract from the "Cooperative and Noncooperative Transitions in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Classic Maya kings were often considered sacred and divine and at the top of the hierarchy of kingdoms. On monuments and decorated vessels, they were depicted as super-human beings, different from other members of society. The royal dynasties of Classic period Petén disappeared from the archaeological eye by the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyne Ponce. Erin Patterson. Clarissa Cagnato.

Archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the Coronitas Group at La Corona, Guatemala provides an opportunity to examine responses to changing sociopolitical conditions among the Classic Maya (AD 250-900). Architectural and material evidence suggests that the Coronitas Group was a locus of ritual and ceremonial activities by the royal court throughout the Classic period. Burials of important individuals and other ceremonial activities imply that it was a place of significant ancestral ties. At...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leonardo García Sanjuán. Francisco Sánchez Díaz.

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. In the last two decades, mega-sites have become a defining feature in the research of Copper Age Iberia, opening up completely new avenues for the analysis of early social complexity in this region. One of the most fascinating cases is the Valencina de la...