Social and Political Organization (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Brandeberry.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. John Pohl’s research is groundbreaking in its analysis of the supporting characters in Mesoamerican royal courts. Secondary elites (including the nobles, priests, merchants, and artisans of the court) vied for power using innovative tactics that worked outside the traditional systems of inherited authority. Pohl’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Györgyi Parditka. Paul R. Duffy. Julia I. Giblin. László Paja.

The transition to the Middle Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin encompassed a broad range of changes in material culture, settlement and social organization. Upon first glance, the Körös-Region was no different from its neighbours. Tell sites emerged, population increased, farming intensified, and people engaged in long distance trade. The international Bronze Age Körös Off-Tell Archaeology (BAKOTA) project has studied this area through settlements and mortuary archaeology for over 11 years. Our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Horowitz.

The small (1 hectare) site of Phlamoudhi-Vounari was built in Late Cypriot IA:1 and abandoned early in Late Cypriot IIA, a lifespan of c. 200 years. This paper presents a 3D model and spatial analysis suggesting that the site functioned as a stage during community gatherings (and greeting visitors). Vounari’s plan is unique on Cyprus: a likely man-made, eight-meter-high mound topped with a sequence of superimposed structures. Initially built with open access to the summit from the higher south...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean White.

This is an abstract from the "Research Hot Off the Trowel in the Upper Gila and Mimbres Areas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mealing facilities include the tools (metates, manos), features (bins), and architecture (kivas, pueblo rooms) used in the process of grinding corn kernels and other materials at an archaeological site. The goal of this poster is to classify, catalog, and compare the properties of mealing facilities in the Mogollon Mimbres...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Elson.

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. Archaeological data from Southwest U.S. platform mound sites will likely not satisfactorily resolve the question of platform mound function and social organization. This is due to the ambiguities inherent in our data base and in our limited opportunities to excavate these features. Because of this, explanations given...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanislava Chavez.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tiwanaku has been described as an expansive state by archaeologists working in the first half of the twentieth century. At that time, the idea of a powerful empire in Bolivian prehistory aided and reinforced the nationalistic political narrative. However, archaeological data does not...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verónica Vázquez López. Felix Kuppat. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Armando Anaya Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history of the Kanu’l dynasty and their Late Classic regime at Calakmul has been researched extensively since the 1990s. The most recent insights into the earlier episodes of Kanu’l politics have emphasized that their seat of power during the Early Classic was Dzibanche and that it was a powerful faction that took power in Calakmul in the early seventh...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Caseldine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the publishing of Irrigation Communities: A Comparative Study in 1955, sociopolitical hierarchy has factored strongly in interpretations of irrigation system control. A lively debate has developed as to where control lies, ranging from a central authority (top-down) to water user cooperatives (bottom-up). Although Hohokam irrigation has appeared in that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle I. Turner.

The Aztec North great house is a monumental Chaco-era building at Aztec Ruins National Monument, in northern New Mexico. Its size, its shape and its dramatic hilltop siting all echo construction norms for other great houses at Chaco Canyon and its outliers, but excavation revealed a surprising set of architectural features. In addition to a fairly typical great house artifact assemblage, we found Chaco-style wall foundations and masonry veneers, but non-Chacoan adobe wall cores. Drawing on ideas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Angelbeck.

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In *The Dawn of Everything*, Graeber and Wengrow present a thought-provoking archaeological history of humankind that challenges common understandings of our pasts. Instead of a linear progression from egalitarian pasts to state-based hierarchies, they show the spectrum of variability...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Cunningham.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Failure" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In a 2017 paper on architectural failures in Minoan Crete I suggested that these reflected a greater focus on signification than on engineering. Still failures, as drains that need refitting and paving that needs replacing cannot be seen otherwise; but a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the underlying purpose of these projects provides insight into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Blomster. Victor Salazar.

The Early Formative evinces the emergence of public space, and more complex communities, in Mesoamerica. Previous archaeological research at the site of Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico, identified a large village during the late Early Formative/Cruz B phase (1200/1150 – 850 BC), including an area tentatively identified as early public space. The Formative Etlatongo Project has concluded three seasons, from 2015 – 2017, of large-scale excavations, confirming the identification of public space in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls. Jason Yaeger.

Public structures in the Maya region materialize ideologies and define centers of power as they create politically charged sacred landscapes. These locations are nexus points for community and polity making processes, embedding social hierarchies, ideologies, and social memories into the physical landscape. However, archaeologists have historically focused attention on monumental public spaces within large civic-ceremonial centers, and relatively little attention has been given to public spaces...

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 Jennifer Birch. Sturt Manning.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper summarizes work completed to date by the Dating Iroquoia project. Our aim has been to construct refined regional chronologies for select Northern Iroquoian community relocation sequences through radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modeling, including novel approaches for overcoming the ca. AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Pierce. Mike Lawrence.

Adjacent to Plaza B at Pacbitun is a Classic Period "palace" complex consisting of three conjoined courtyards each ringed by elevated range structures, likely serving elite-residential and administrative functions. Previous excavations indicated initial construction in the Early Classic period with numerous modifications made in the Late Classic, and preliminary evidence of occupation or use into the Terminal Classic period. The Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project has begun to explore this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Pigott.

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Mississippian world was populated with several chiefly polities competing for regional dominance in a constantly shifting socio-political landscape. In the mid-sixteenth century, two Spanish entradas, led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, would become entangled in this competitive landscape, attempting to bring late Medieval...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Devin Henson. Olivia Navarro-Farr.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Woodland period in eastern North America has traditionally been conceptualized as a cultural hiatus between the region’s Hopewell and Mississippian traditions. As a drastic (though not complete) reduction in the practices of monumental architecture and art produced with nonlocal materials occurred during this time, the end of the preceding Hopewell...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antje Gunsenheimer.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contribution deals with the question of how crimes were punished in the Aztec penal system. We know that Aztec society—as many other premodern societies—did not have prisons for long-term punishment of crimes, nor for any forms of preventive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Murillo-Herrera. Felipe Sol-Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since 2007, the project "Cambio social precolombino en San Ramón, Alajuela y sus alrededores" has aimed to reconstruct the trajectory of precolumbian social change (from at least 1000 BC to AD 1550) in this region of Costa Rica using systematic and standardized procedures. The most general and ambitious aim of the project is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Vallejo-Caliz. Scott Hutson.

Regional integration as materialized by the connections created through sacbeob can widely transform political, economic and social institutions in the participant communities. Perceiving the process through dichotomies such as center-periphery or paramount-subordinate clouds the agency of the multiple stakeholders involved in the matter. Active manipulation of social systems by intermediate elites and the commoner population seems to have had a great influence on the general process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nam Kim.

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. Archaeologists continue to be interested in the development of political complexity and early forms of “states.” There is compelling evidence that leadership strategies and political centralization in such polities involved modification and reengineering of both social and landscape topographies, making...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Regnier. Scott Hammerstedt. Patrick Livingood.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Spiro Mounds, located in eastern Oklahoma, is known almost solely for the spectacular collection of well-preserved ritual objects unearthed when looters tunneled into the Craig Mound in the 1930s. The dramatic story of the looting and subsequent dynamiting of the Craig Mound has led many archaeologist to believe the site has no remaining intact...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oscar Arias Espinoza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En esta exposición se discuten las características y el significado de la práctica ritual de renovación del templo encontrada en Chavín de Huántar (Perú) durante nuestras investigaciones. Proponemos que esta formó parte de un conjunto de estrategias de reproducción social que sirvieron para legitimar el poder y la autoridad de la élite que ocupó este...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aribidesi Usman.

This paper will report the 2017 excavation at Okete-Kakini site near the king’s (Attah) palace in Idah. Okete-Kakini was the residential area of Attah’s eunuchs (amonoji), one of the two major palace officials who carried out various functions for the Attah. The aim of the investigation is to identify the activities of the palatine elites through an examination of their material culture found in archaeological excavations. It is thought that the members of the palatine groups, like the formal...