Power Relations and Inequality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Luley.

The Roman conquest of Mediterranean Gaul between 125-121 B.C. significantly altered the Celtic societies living in the region. Two of these dramatic transformations were the increasing use of coins in economic transactions, and a marked rise in socio-economic inequality within the conquered province. This paper examines the connections in Roman Mediterranean Gaul of the first century B.C. through the first century A.D. between the emergence of a monetized economy, debt, and increased...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasey Diserens Morgan.

A national narrative glorifying the deep past of Mexico was formed using archaeological sites. The government has gone to great lengths to rebuild and preserve many ancient indigenous sites and objects for use as national symbols and as a draw for tourism. However, this practice has contributed to the ‘othering’ of indigenous groups by placing the ‘mysterious Indians’ firmly in the past, and restricting the access of descendant communities. Working within a modern Maya community, the members...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Cancho Ruiz. Alicia Gorman.

This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nuestra investigación busca entender la relación entre la religión y la política en contextos domésticos durante la época Nasca. Es así que Cerro Tortolita (valle de alto de Ica), dada su naturaleza y escala constructiva; el cual incluye un componente ceremonial y otro residencial; constituye un sitio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Evans.

This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The European conquest of the Aztec Empire was eased by strong parallels in Aztec and European courtly behavior in their respective (and contemporaneous) chronological periods, the Late Postclassic (1430–1521) and Renaissance (various dates, 1300s to about 1600). Elite marital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Shephard. Martin Gallivan.

Seventeenth-century colonial chroniclers repeatedly mention a series of places and objects that surrounded political negotiations and efforts at alliance-building by Powhatan societies. While regional scholarship has focused on competition over subsistence resources, regional trade dynamics, and the regulated exchange of "prestige goods" as central to the development of these political structures, we shift the focus toward the engagement between these societies and specific places and objects...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jana Meyer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Merovingian society (450–751 CE) was strongly stratified with differences in social standing being written in law and affecting many aspects of life, such as occupation and access to material, nutritional, and medical resources. How did these status differences become embodied in Early Medieval Thuringia? This study explores the cumulative effect of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kurnick.

Over the last several decades, scholars have reexamined the importance of spatiality to human life and argued that space is social, relational, and that it produces and is produced by social relationships. This reconceptualization of space has highlighted the ways in which the production of landscapes is integral to the creation, maintenance, and negation of social inequality and political authority. Recent archaeological approaches to studying inequality through landscape have taken a variety...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past ecological and political-economic changes are embedded in the materiality of the landscape, and investigating correlations between such changes can suggest how relationships between ecology and economy were structured and managed within past societies. Iceland was first settled in the late ninth century by wealthy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lynn Dodd. Ran Boytner.

This is an abstract from the "From Households to Empires: Papers Presented in Honor of Bradley J. Parker" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2003, Bradley Parker co-organized a workshop at the University of Utah exploring the politics of archaeology, with emphasis on the Middle East. Both at the workshop and in the resulting edited volume, Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East, contributors...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Martin.

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. The region now divided by the national boundaries of Belize and Guatemala was once home to a broad range of political entities. Noticeably, large centers with monumental inscriptions in the western and southern portions contrast with smaller and far less textually verbose sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Hodgetts. Kisha Supernant. Natasha Lyons. John Welch. Marie-Pier Cantin.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do different archaeological practitioners experience and navigate the power inequities built into our disciplinary institutions? Our 2019 online survey of Canadian archaeologists gathered information from over 550 students and practitioners. It explored experiences of sexual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Callaghan. Brigitte Kovacevich. Rachel Gill. Karla Cardona.

Recent research in the Maya lowlands has shown that "E-Group" architectural complexes were intricately tied to the development of complex society during the Middle Preclassic period (900 BC – 300 BC). First identified at the site of Uaxactun, Guatemala, E-Group complexes consist of a western radial platform and eastern range structure. For many years Maya archaeologists believed E-Groups functioned primarily as celestial observatories. However, recent data have shown E-groups were the locus of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Heath-Stout.

This is an abstract from the "Presidential Session: What Is at Stake? The Impacts of Inequity and Harassment on the Practice of Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this Presidential Session, we are exploring how and why archaeology remains dominated by white, straight, and (in positions of power) men. One piece of this puzzle is recruitment of archaeologists, which tends to take place in field schools and academic departments. How do...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josefina Vasquez.

The Inka incorporated the territory of today's Ecuador to the Tawantinsuyu around 1420. This conquest is well documented from South to North by recording the expansion of monumental features such as pukaras, tambos, bridges, terraces, collkas, wakas, patios and plazas, built in traditional Inka style. The political transformation of northern Andes landscape by the Inka was very profound in the Loja and Azuay provinces of southern Ecuador. While it was a milder transformative factor around Quito...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary Clarke. Henry Perez. Boris Beltran. Heather Hurst.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The organization of labor in Classic Maya society has long been studied from a top-down approach. The construction of public works is seen as a facet of state economy, while the physical evidence of human effort—monumental constructions—are understood as visible manifestations of labor or service-based taxes. The argument for collective or rotational labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Emmanuel Salazar Chávez. Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research on subsistence systems in Early Formative (1600–900 BCE) Mesoamerican communities contest longstanding concepts linking the growth of early sociopolitical complexity with full-time agriculture. Lowland-focused studies have introduced mixed nonagricultural models in coastal regions that were able to support both sedentary groups and much larger...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Els Barnard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many recent studies about the distribution of wealth in ancient Mesoamerican cities are revealing new insights into the ways socioeconomic processes were organized. Measures of inequality, like the Gini index, reveal patterns of wealth distribution and socioeconomic stratification, permitting research into the relationships between the rich and the poor. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alicia Gorman. Christian G. Cancho.

This is an abstract from the "Developments through Time on the South Coast of Peru: In Memory of Patrick Carmichael" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study I use the ceramic assemblage at Cerro Tortolita as a means of addressing issues related to social differentiation. Cerro Tortolita is an Early Intermediate period site occupied from about AD 250–450 in the Upper Ica Valley on the south coast of Peru. It includes a large ceremonial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Roa. John Walden. Michael Biggie. Gavin Wisner. Rafael Guerra.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Maya archaeologists have traditionally used faunal analyses to examine questions about subsistence and ritual practices. We chart diachronic changes in patterns of faunal usage pertaining to four sociocultural dimensions: consumption, economic productions, wealth, and ritual at three districts surrounding the Late Classic (AD 600–900) Maya political center of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Alan Covey.

It is commonplace to note that the Inca Empire was the most powerful indigenous state in the Americas before the time of European invasions. Retrospective sixteenth-century Inca accounts played up the scale and intensity of imperial social power, but the ethnohistory and archaeology of the Cuzco region of highland Peru--the Inca capital region--indicate more nuanced networks of power across the imperial heartland. Using Michael Mann's typology for social power as a guide, this poster develops...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Brown.

Stephen Williams had strong interests in the history of archaeology, prehistoric Indian mounds, and historical archaeology. This paper combines aspects of each of these interests. Cemeteries associated with Indian mounds commonly occur in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Numerous reasons have been put forth over the years as to why early Anglo-American settlers decided to bury their dead on mounds, ranging from flooding issues, to avoidance of valuable farmland, to a preference for burying on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli.

The link between Lowland Maya ritual and power relations during the Preclassic period has been so far approached primarily through iconographic, burial and artifact data at the local scale. Very little evidence exists linking notions of political authority, ritual practices and landscapes at the regional level. Recent survey and excavation data from the Cival region of Northeastern Peten, reveals a vast and complex settlement pattern. The Preclassic Maya city of Cival was surrounded by a network...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alonso Binimelis.

Durante el Periodo Intermedio Tardío en las tierras altas de Arica, las influencias altiplánicas se encontraban en la sierra y valles altos, caracterizados por arquitectura funeraria (chulpas) y la cerámica, representando relaciones de poder y estatus social dentro de las comunidades locales. Durante el Periodo Tardío, con la introducción de elementos incaicos al altiplano boliviano, el área dominada por los pueblos altiplánicos fue influenciada por la cosmovisión y tecnología incaica, lugares...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rozenn Colleter. Michael Richards. Dominique Garcia.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research about the biological impacts of social inequality is at the center of the humanities and social sciences. Social inequalities impact multiple determinants of health such as lifestyle, diet, and housing. Questions about inequalities, therefore, can be addressed by using isotopic data related to collected by archaeologists. This project compiles...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valentina Martinoia Zamolo. Mario Novak. Dragana Rajkovic. Goran Tomac. Michael Richards.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beli Manastir (Slavonia, Croatia) is the largest Middle-Late Neolithic habitation site discovered in Croatia. A total of 37 individuals were found in different burial positions and different areas of this site, and sometimes within burial clusters, with only 3 individuals buried with abundant grave goods. The burials were, in most cases, placed between or...