Power Relations and Inequality (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Douglas. Jeffrey Altschul. Gerry Wait. Ibrahima Thiaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Initiative for Sustainable Development in Africa (ISDAf) was conceived in 2020 to raise awareness of the need to engage local indigenous and descendent (LID) communities as equal partners in Strategic Environmental and Social Assessments (SESA) and Environmental and Social Impact Assessments (ESIAs) for development and conservation projects at the...

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 Pilar Regueiro Suarez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Archaeological Investigations in Chiapas, Mexico" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the eighth century, the stone monuments of Yaxchilán and its area of influence recurrently recorded individuals with the title sajal, a position associated with leaders of corporate groups with functions related to the government of peripheral sites, administration, war, and circulation of goods. Among all the sajals of...

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 Martin Furholt.

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. An overarching idea of *The Dawn of Everything* is that archaeologists should be encouraged to explore the past as a world of possibilities, not the least with regard to social and political organization. Taking up this call, this paper will reexamine two of the main conceptual...

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 Ángel González López. Nelda Marengo Camacho.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan’s religious thought, sacrifice was a creative act closely related to cosmic genesis and world sense. This behavior is evident not only in the archaeological record but also in the iconography. Two of the most common artifacts associated with this ancient practice in both...

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 Guy Duke. Aleksa Alaica. Lindsey Paskulin.

This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Feasting has long been acknowledged as a central element in Andean social and economic life. Crucial to this emphasis on feasting during the Late Moche period (AD 600–850) is the need for tribute and the redistribution of the goods brought in by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mica Jones.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Great Zimbabwe (GZ) is key for understanding precolonial African urban systems. Cattle bones are some of the most common materials recovered from GZ and have played a central role in interpreting the ways power was enacted at the site over time. Scholars use dental wear and eruption data from cattle molars and long bone epiphyseal fusion patterns to argue...

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 Ines Sastre Prats. Brais Currás Refojos.

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. For a researcher raised on a political-economy archaeological tradition, the assertion that the origin of inequality is not the relevant point in anthropological research is a shake. But after a careful reading of *The Dawn of Everything*, we are still persuaded that social relations...

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...