Social and Political Organization (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jocelyne Ponce. Marcello Canuto. Tomás Barrientos.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuriy Polyukhovych.

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. In this report the authors present their interpretation of the history of Altar de Sacrificios from the first textual records to the collapse of the Classic Maya civilization. Although the corpus of local monuments was published by John Graham back in 1972, the information contained there requires careful analysis and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau. Christopher Hernandez. Nancy Gonlin.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Edwards. Robert Jeske.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Golden. Takeshi Inomata.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout his decades of scholarship, Stephen Houston has fundamentally changed our understanding of Maya courtly life and community. He synergistically weaves results from groundbreaking decipherment and archaeological excavations like no other scholar in the field. His many publications...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Shephard.

This is an abstract from the "Deep History, Colonial Narratives, and Decolonization in the Native Chesapeake" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the relationship between the human body and the objects that adorned them within the Late Woodland through early colonial (AD 900–1680) Algonquian Chesapeake. Drawing on theories that cite the human body as the battle ground upon which political authority is established, I seek to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alizé Lacoste Jeanson.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient Maya land is characterized by a great diversity of funerary practices. The settlement of Lakamha’ (Palenque) sharply evidences such heterogeneity: pluralism is found in terms of places of inhumation, types of containers, number of people per grave, grave goods, postmortem treatments, positions, and orientations of the body....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kodiak Aracena.

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Imperialism: Negotiated Communities and Landscapes of the Inka Provinces" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La anexión de otros grupos culturales fue una estrategia sociopolítica recurrente de la política incaica durante el siglo XV. Dichas estrategias tendían a variar según la ubicación, las características de los grupos humanos, y el tipo de la relación de éstos con el Incario. Mediante la investigación para...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Megumi Arata.

This is an abstract from the "Social Dynamics in the North Highlands of Peru during the Formative Period: Pacopampa project’s Contribution for Understanding the Early Complex Societies in the Andes" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The excavations and subsequent analysis of the unearthed artifacts have provided evidence of metal smelting and metalworking at the Pacopampa site. Although the production workshop remains unidentified, it has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jordan Dalton.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Occupations of the Chincha Valley are well-known during the Formative Period (1800 BC – AD 200) when the valley was home to the Paracas people, and the late Prehispanic periods (AD 1200-1532) when it was home to the Chincha Kingdom, but research is just beginning to address the thousand years between these two cultural groups. In this paper, I will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Terry Powis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological investigations have taken place at two pre-contact villages located across the Etowah River from the Leake site located in Bartow County, Georgia. Excavations at Lower Dabbs and Cummings have yielded substantial cultural deposits from excavations carried out over the past decade. Leake is regarded as the pre-eminent site in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Chatelain.

Excavations at minor centers provide us not only with a wealth of information about those sites, but they can also illuminate sociopolitical shifts over time within the broader region. The minor center of La Cariba, located four kilometers southwest of La Corona, has been investigated since 2009. A broad dataset including architectural, epigraphic, osteological, and artifactual evidence has provided a detailed narrative of political and demographic changes over a millennium at La Cariba. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Dye.

This is an abstract from the "Acquiring Status and Power in Transegalitarian and Chiefdom Societies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early eighteenth century French accounts concerning the Choctaw and Natchez provide critical insights into the multiple strategies Mississippian chiefly elites employed to gain and legitimize power. I argue that ruling elites devised multiple means to garner, enhance, and legitimize holds over various sources of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Brown. Mark D. Willis. Chester P. Walker.

This is an abstract from the "Towards a Standardization of Photogrammetric Methods in Archaeology: A Conversation about 'Best Practices' in An Emerging Methodology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2007 our team has been conducting low level aerial reconnaissance in the northern highlands of Ecuador, a challenging environment with low air pressure, frequent high winds, misting rain, and rapidly alternating intense sun and enveloping low lying...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Lulewicz.

The scale and structure of the relationships through which social capital is generated, amassed, and controlled must be understood if we are to evaluate the emergence and evolution of organizationally complex social, political, and economic institutions. At any one point in time however, actors or entities are undoubtedly embedded and engaged in a number of distinct, yet overlapping, relational fields. In this paper I interrogate three networks, representing three separate sets of relationships,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Brown.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents preliminary results from excavations at the Formative (2200 BCE–200 CE) site of Muyumoqo in the Chitapampa Basin, Cusco, Peru. A systematic survey of the Cusco Basin and surrounding regions raised several questions about Muyumoqo’s role in the local economy and its relation to polities forming during the Late Formative. Results from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zoe Rawski.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last decade, the Mopan Valley Preclassic Project has extensively investigated the Preclassic ceremonial center of Early Xunantunich, Belize. These excavations have yielded significant information regarding the construction of monumental architecture during the Middle and Late Preclassic periods, as well as data regarding early ritual activities and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

Immediately after the consolidation of the Aztec Empire, Itzcoatl, the king of Tenochtitlan, ordered the destruction of the ancient codices from newly incorporated territories. By erasing these alternative histories, Itzcoatl paved the way for the construction of an official imperial history that bolstered the political aims of Aztec leaders. Nearly a century later, a second wave of erasures occurred when Spanish conquerors destroyed indigenous books and idols in an effort to eradicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pacifico. Melissa Vogel.

El Purgatorio was the capital city of the Casma State, occupied from AD 700 to 1400. Neighborhoods at El Purgatorio were organized around social status, which was in turn related to a number of factors including occupation, access to and control over economic and ritual resources, and possibly length of tenure at the site. Neighborhoods were distinguished from one another by their architectural and topographical qualities, and exhibit both planned and organic elements. Neighborhoods also...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington. Soren Frykholm.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate levels of social organization—above the household, but below the entire settlement, city, or polity—are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in archaeological contexts, but they nevertheless represent a crucial frontier for building new archaeological theory to understand daily social life in the past. Ethnographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson.

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. Recent research suggests that locations on the continuum of collective to despotic forms of governance correlate with degrees of inequality. Among more despotic forms of governance, certain individuals disproportionately accrue resources, increasing wealth inequality. However, how governance affects different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese. Linda Manzanilla.

Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of a powerful dynasty of rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. However, the alternative possibility of a corporate or collective government, perhaps headed by a small number of co-rulers, also remains poorly understood. A third option is that the city’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Alperstein.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is considerable academic debate surrounding the absence of Woodland Period Village sites in New England. While some scholars acknowledge the lack of village sites to a preservation bias, other scholars argue that the late adoption of Maize and other domesticates in the region is evidence that village settlements never existed in the region until the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Florencio Delgado Espinoza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early chronicles indicate that the Manteño groups organized themselves along the coast into complex trading chiefdoms: these regional polities, controlled ports, and navigation equipment such as balsa rafts. In addition, maize agriculture combined with seafood products conformed their subsistence economy. Echoing early chronicles, some scholars indicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Castro-Priego. Lauro Olmo-Enciso. Marcos Octavio Labrada Ochoa.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The "Perduraciones" project, which has been taking place in the central area of the Ecuadorian coast since 2018, has focused part of their research on the characterization of the social space resulting from the process of articulating European colonization on the present coast of Ecuador during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In the...