Power Relations and Inequality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Khatchadourian.

To borrow Yuri Slezkine’s formulation, "the Soviet Union was an empire—in the sense of being very big, bad, asymmetrical, hierarchical, heterogeneous, and doomed". In this it differed little from the early empires that have long held archaeology’s attention. But unlike its precursors, the U.S.S.R. was guided by a political ideology premised vigorously on the relationship between humans and things—between labor, the non-human inputs of production, and property. Imperial sovereignty rested on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Brown. Veronique Belisle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While most research on emerging inequalities in prehistoric societies has focused on the elaboration of inequality in villages and polities on the periphery of large states, less attention has been placed on settlements existing outside influential regional centers. In this paper, we present the case of the Andean Middle Horizon (600-1000 C.E.) site of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tim Kohler. Amy Bogaard.

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. In this paper we summarize key results from the previous papers in this symposium, all of which report preliminary findings of the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project. As Lauren Bacall sings in “To Have and Have Not”: how little we know! Archaeologists have assembled the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Scott Baxter.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Summit Camp was occupied by Chinese railroad workers from 1864 to 1869. It was the longest occupied camp associated with the building of the transcontinental railroad. Workers from the camp excavated a series of tunnels through the granite bedrock of the Sierra Nevada...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa LeCount. Jason Yaeger. Bernadette Cap. Borislava Simova.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We explore the pragmatics of Classic Maya politics in the Mopan River valley of western Belize during the Classic period. Drawing on Okoshi-Harada’s (2012) reconstruction of sixteenth-century Maya political dynamics and Inomata’s (2006) view of polities created through the interaction among social agents in specific historical and spatial contexts, we see...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Harrod. Kathryn Baustian.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The intent of this presentation is to compare patterns of violence on human skeletal remains recovered from archaeological sites in the San Juan Basin associated with Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region in the US Southwest. The Chaco sites date to AD 850–1300, while the Mimbres sites date to AD 650–1300. Bioarchaeological signatures of violence on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Catlin.

Eleventh century Iceland was a period of transition. The settlement of the island two centuries earlier set off cascading environmental and landscape changes whose agricultural consequences were then evident, including deforestation, erosion, and wetland alteration. Meanwhile, the rise of a wealthy landowning class altered the economic basis of society from primarily household production towards more centralized structures of rent extraction and tenancy. On Hegranes, a region in Skagafjörður,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Ellis. John P. Walden. Kyle Shaw-Müller. Claire E. Ebert. Julie A. Hoggarth.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Traditional anthropological perspectives depict feasting events as a way of promoting social cohesion, as well as reinforcing inequalities. As described by Spanish observers, Postclassic and Colonial (~AD 1280-1600) Maya elites hosted elaborate feasts to reward their followers’ loyalty. Similar events are shown on polychrome pottery, depicting Classic Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayeleigh Sharp. Carlos Osores Mendives. Izumi Shimada.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 30 years, perspectives on the Gallinazo and Virú have changed significantly. Results of 2022 intensive surface survey and accompanying drone-based mapping of sites on the south bank of the mid-La Leche Valley show that reassessment must continue. Comparable to the monumental crafting center of Cerro Songoy-Cojal in the mid-Zaña Valley to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Travis Chai Andrade.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often thought of as a discipline that concerns itself with ruins—that which is in the past—archaeology also serves the settler-colonial project, in the present and the future. For that reason, archaeology inherently functions as a political tool, even if typically imagined as an apolitical means of “preserving” the past. In other words, archaeology offers...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón. Yahaira Núñez-Cortés. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Central America is rich in examples of early complex societies, and yet, the timing and mechanism for the emergence of social complexity and differentiation are still not well understood. Recent works are moving archaeologists in the region to question, on the one hand, the definition of social complexity itself, and on the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Catherine Cameron.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Raiding and captive-taking were common activities in small-scale societies prior to the modern era. A majority of captives were women and children; some were enslaved while others were incorporated into the societies they joined. Ethnohistoric accounts make it clear that regardless of their social position, captives created power for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Silvana Rosenfeld. Matthew Sayre.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The advances in food studies have revealed significant new information about life during the Middle Horizon (AD 600-1000) in the central Andes of Peru. Botanical and faunal data from Wari affiliated sites shows differential use of at least two items: molle (Schinus molle) and guinea pigs (Cavia...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph.

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. Recent years have witnessed a sea change in anthropological discourse concerning how gender bias and a lack of diversity has affected the work that archaeologists produce, interest that dovetails with current concerns about equity and safety issues. More broadly, Black,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Roddick. Erik Marsh.

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. More than 30 years ago, Garth Bawden wrote a prescient review on the "Andean State as a State of Mind." He critiqued Andean scholars for focusing on the state as an analytical unit. He complained that much good scholarship was being ruined due to the "albatross of the state," and urged...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claire Smith.

This presentation focusses on Larry Zimmerman’s contributions to world archaeology through his leadership roles within the World Archaeological Congress. This includes his various roles on the WAC Executive and Council and his convening of the first Indigenous Inter-Congress, held at Vermillion, South Dakota in 1989 and the subsequent development of the Vermillion Accord on Human Remains.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Cesario.

The settlement of Iceland, a previously uninhabited landscape, began a series of human-induced environmental changes that have had lasting effects on not just the land but on social organization as well. As land claims were made for household farms, hierarchy developed and some were pushed to settle on the margins. In Hegranes, a region in Skagafjörður, northern Iceland, the sites that are on the margins are often much smaller than the others and may not have been farms at all but rather...