Social and Political Organization (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nino Vadick Del Solar Velarde.

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. In this research, a highly representative sample of ceramics (n=80) from the archaeological site of Isla Chico at the Historic Sanctuary of Machupicchu (corresponding to pre-Hispanic pottery from the Formative, Early Intermediate, Middle Horizon, Late Intermediate and Late Horizon periods) has been characterized...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jana Veleminska. Jan Dupej. Jaroslav Bruzek. Lumir Polacek. Petr Veleminsky.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. According to the archaeological and written sources Great Moravian Medieval society was highly socially stratified. Recorded differences in facial cranial morpholology were partly interpreted as a result of different masticatory load, and thus of different dietary habits in various socioeconomic classes. In this study we present a detailed analysis of cranial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucas Johnson.

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. Flaked and ground stone from ancient Maya domestic contexts continue to offer fundamental insights into domestic activities. Additionally, geological attributes of lithic materials generally afford the analysis of regional trade by contrasting local versus regionally accessible materials. Applying classification criteria...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alba Tellez-Nieto. Joshua Englehardt.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La sierra norte de Hidalgo no está bien documentada arqueológicamente, a pesar de su ubicación entre dos esferas culturales mayores del Postclásico: el señorío de Metztitlán y la Huasteca. Este trabajo busca llenar esta laguna del conocimiento, con dos metas principales: identificar la organización sociopolítica de los...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael L. Loughlin. Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Los Rituales del Juego de Pelota en la Costa del Golfo / Ballgame Rituals in the Gulf Lowlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although ballgame paraphernalia and figurines depicting ballgame players have been reported from Tres Zapotes and other nearby sites since the 1930s, the identification of ballcourts in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin (ELPB) has been elusive. At Tres Zapotes, the areas between mounds and in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Lau. Milton Luján.

This is an abstract from the "After the Feline Cult: Social Dynamics and Cultural Reinvention after Chavín" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent field investigations at the hilltop site of Pashash clarify key diachronic changes during the rise of segmentary lordships in the Pallasca highlands of northern Ancash, Peru. Ceramic, radiocarbon, architectural, and ancillary contextual evidence help to reveal local cultural patterns tracking the Pashash...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thatcher Seltzer-Rogers.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whereas archaeologists continue to investigate processes of culture contact and frontier construction in hunter-gatherer and small agricultural societies using models primarily originally created and applied for ancient states and modern geopolitics, historians have recently begun investigating Indigenous borderlands. My dissertation, which includes the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Solar-Valverde.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Toward the end of the sixth century AD, a great fire destroyed the ceremonial center of Teotihuacan, capital of the largest urban development in Mesoamerica. This event was the culmination of a long process of disintegration of Teotihuacan’s macroregional system, a process that began during the ancient city’s apogee. This presentation will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lars Fehren-Schmitz. Kelly Harkins. John Krigbaum. Regulo Jordan. Jeffrey Quilter.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The genomic revolution opened up new dimensions for paleogenomic research, inconceivable only a decade ago. However, with a primary focus on big-picture population genetics like large-scale migration events, paleogenetics also became somewhat removed from problem-based archaeological research questions with a regional focus, addressing issues such...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Ware.

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. The basic building blocks of human communities are residential groups held together by ties of kinship. As communities increase in number and size during the Neolithic, residential kinship groups persist, of course, but new institutions may emerge that draw their members from multiple residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Knappett.

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. In scholarship on the Bronze Age Aegean, there is a robust conjunction of palace, town, and state. If we take the case of Knossos, then the presumed central authority represented by its palatial complex, and its surrounding town covering 100 ha, are generally thought to imply an associated territory under...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xiaofan Sun. Sen You. Jinping Wang. Quanchao Zhang. Qian Wang.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Therapeutic craniotomy is a kind of artificial trepanation used for treating head injuries. In this study, a skull with signs of trauma and trepanation from a young adult female who lived 3,000 years ago was assessed in the context of medical care systems and a policy of benevolence during the time. A blunt force assault on the left temporal bone induced a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hampson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, research on prehistoric roads in the southwest has been heavily focused on Chaco and the San Juan Basin, however, these enigmatic anomalies extend into the Central and Western Mesa Verde Regions as well. LiDAR data for the Four Corners area has made it possible to peer through the trees and shrubs of the Great Sage Plain and observe the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Attila Gyucha. William Parkinson. Richard Yerkes.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable increase in the number of joint prehistoric archaeological research programs of US and local scholars in Eastern Europe. These collaborative projects are featured by the innovative blend of profoundly different theoretical and methodological traditions. In our introductory paper to the session, with a focus on the Carpathian Basin, we illustrate similarities and differences in North American and Eastern European perspectives and approaches to explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Cochrane. Seth Quintus. Matiu Prebble. Ta'iao Matiu Matavai Tautunu.

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explanations of sociopolitical complexity are often linked to competition over the control of resources and changes in resource structure, including productivity, predictability, distribution, and other characteristics. These explanations also reference variables of human demography and the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For the ancient Maya, the second century B.C. was a period of growth and consolidation; populations boomed, and a common set of cultural ideas spread across the Maya Lowlands. This expansion of ideas is evident in the widespread presence of chicanel ceramics, the spread of a unified Late Preclassic figural style found on mural and carved monuments, and in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1900s, American anthropologists characterized Diné society as a four-tiered social organizational structure with “natural communities” at the highest level. Often referred to as regional “bands,” these geographically defined, economically self-sufficient, multifamily social entities were loosely organized under the nominal leadership of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maureen Marshall.

This is an abstract from the "The South Caucasus Region: Crossroads of Societies & Polities. An Assessment of Research Perspectives in Post-Soviet Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bioarchaeological analysis of human remains excavated by Project ArAGATS in the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia has allowed for a unique view onto Bronze Age life and has offered a glimpse into the lived experience of populations constituting early complex polities....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marta Alfonso-Durruty.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hunter-gatherer (HG) groups show high levels of cooperation expressed through practices like food sharing. Although an egalitarian ethos has been identified in many HG, their social structures are not only variable but can intentionally and repeatedly alternate between different levels of hierarchy. The origin of inequality among HG has been attributed to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Robinson. Marlen Garnica.

Archaeological survey of Cakhay, the largest Classic site (200-800 A.D.) in the Maya Kaq’chik’el area, was carried out in 2017 by the Proyecto Arqueológico del Área Kaq’chik’el (PAAK). The goal of the survey was to determine the limits of the site and survey its periphery. Reconnaissance of 20 sq km found that populations were nucleated on the hillside surrounding the defensive and religious center with some look out sites in the periphery. Within the center and the nucleus of the site,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Armit.

The Iron Age in Britain has traditionally been seen as a period of hierarchical, warrior-based, Celtic societies, characterised by hillforts, defended settlements and elaborate weaponry. The dominant interpretive models have emanated from Wessex – that area of central southern England where the largest and most impressive hillforts are found. In recent decades, however, archaeologists have increasingly recognised the marked regional differences inherent in Iron Age societies across different...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bill Sillar.

The Inca encountered the Canas and Canchis ethnic groups when they expanded out of Cuzco. Canas sites in the herding areas of Espinar show larger scale and more developed settlements than most of those in their agricultural region of the upper Vilcanota Valley. This raises questions about the scale of ‘community’ (village, kinship group, subsistence group, ethnic group). But to address this we need to consider the degree to which allegiance to leaders, ancestors and huacas as well as the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Roscoe.

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. The CfAS’s Inequality Project focuses on economic inequality, a feature of modern society that has attracted both increasing public concern and growing historical and social research because of its critical implications for individual, national, and global well-being. The Inequality...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wieslaw Wieckowski.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Care and Power" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recent discovery of the tomb of the Master Basketmaker within the Gallery of Elite Craftsmen, located in the nearest vicinity of the imperial Wari tomb at the site of Castillo de Huarmey, Peru, presents an exceptional opportunity to analyze the interplay between different tiers of elites, particularly in the context of the presence of disabled...