Social and Political Organization: States and Empires (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Lucero.

This is an abstract from the "Essential Contributions from African to Global Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar mapping has revealed extensive ancestral settlement patterns signifying a low-density urban system. Maya archaeologists are tasked with interpreting how the ancestral Maya interacted and kept this system working for over 1,000 years (ca. 100 BCE–900 CE) in the southern Maya lowlands of Central America. It was a complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey Hedges-Knyrim.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The agricultural economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant remains underexplored archaeobotanically, especially at an integrated, regional level. The data that is available suffers from few abundance datasets and is often difficult to access or unpublished. Out of 26 Iron Age sites with available data, only 6 have abundance values and other quantitative...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorenzo Castellano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek. Ricardo Armijo Torres. William Folan. Hubert Robichaux.

Oxpemul was one of several centers surrounding the city of Calakmul, within the region known as Uxte’tuun. Archaeological research at Oxpemul reflects occupation continuity from the Formative through Classic periods. However, hieroglyphic inscriptions indicate a late fluorescence in the mid to late eighth century. This paper explains this seeming contradiction from the perspective of broader geopolitical dynamics, particularly the rivalry between Calakmul and Tikal. Unlinke other centers in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Becker.

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. Early explorers thought that Tiwanaku was a ritual or pilgrimage center because of its heartland location in the high-altitude, seemingly inhospitable altiplano of Bolivia. Years after “progressing” beyond a ceremonial center, Tiwanaku was fit into the “state” category within a political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sergei Vepretskii. Dmitri Beliaev. Monica de Leon. Camilo Luin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya site of El Encanto is situated 12 km to the northeast from Tikal epicenter. Discovered in 1907 and occasionally visited by various projects throughout the twentieth century, it has never been the subject of large-scale excavations. Based on the map by the University of Pennsylvania Tikal project in 1964 that included two groups, El Encanto was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Aguilar.

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. Archaeological surveys at a regional scale have faced the dilemma of concordance between the archaeological sampling units, normally defined by physiographic elements of the landscape, and the use of significant components of the studied societies, for example, political units or symbolic landscapes. Research undertaken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Hardy.

This paper explores the use of assemblage theory, derived from the work of theorists such as Deleuze, Guattari, and DeLanda, as a way of overcoming inherent problems in earlier attempts at understanding sociopolitical change. Exploring the implications of this historical materialist approach involves linking processes operating at different scales of time, and tracing historical genealogies of practice and the ways they were assembled to produce political sovereignty. I argue that not only are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Monica De Leon Antillon. Sergey Vepretskiy. Camilo Luin.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Encanto is a peripherical site (frequently classified as a 'minor center') northeast from the Ancient Maya metropolis of Tikal. It is famous because of the stela with hieroglyphic inscription dated to AD 305-308 and mentioning the king Siyaj Chan K'awil I. Previously Simon Martin suggested that the stela originally stood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Evans.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztec empire existed for only ninety years, yet its structure was derived from earlier political constructs and endured after the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. It was a dendritic system, each node of power manifested in a palace -- Nahuatl tecpan (lord-place) -- that functioned as a locus of sociopolitical and sacred authority. Lord-places are as old as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jody Gordon.

This is an abstract from the "World-Systems and Globalization in Archaeology: Assessing Models of Intersocietal Connections 50 Years since Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System”" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2007, a children’s book about Cypriot history entitled “The Island that Everyone Wanted” was published. Despite being aimed at a juvenile audience, this title aptly encapsulates the history of Cyprus, i.e., as an island coveted by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronique Belisle.

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. In the Cusco region of southern Peru, the Middle Horizon has generally been interpreted as a period during which a strong Wari imperial state conquered and then tightly controlled local populations and resources. Research conducted at the large Wari installation of Pikillaqta and at other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Garcia-Putnam. Melissa Murphy. Christopher T. Fisher.

Little is known about the impact of Purépecha Empire formation on the skeletal health and well being of communities within the core zone of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, during the Postclassic period (AD 1000-1500). Here we report on recent bioarchaeological investigation of 19 mortuary contexts from the ancient Purépecha city of Angamuco located within the imperial heartland. We have identified at least seven different mortuary treatments from Angamuco and we compare these contexts with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Valda Black. Danielle Kurin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An empire expanding into a previously established community can have significant impacts on the identity and culture of the conquered, depending on the negotiations set into place between the invaders and native communities. A prominent example of these negotiations of imperial control occurred in the prehistoric highlands when the Inca rose to power...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Chirinos Ogata.

Wari expansion across the Central Andes involved the construction of colonies, serving as nodes in the state network from Cajamarca to Moquegua. Each colony, even considering local adaptations, was built following a precise sequence and setting up predetermined types of spaces. Monumental architecture exhibiting Wari features and design became an expression of power by itself, a symbol of Wari hegemony physically inscribed in the local social landscape. Large amounts of work were invested in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave. R. Alan Covey.

Indiscriminate invocation of the term ayllu constrains archaeological reconstructions of community organization in the pre-contact Andean highlands. Legacies of earlier generations of anthropological scholarship encourage researchers to assume particular traits of sociopolitical organization. Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from the Cuzco region of Peru demonstrates how such assumptions can be an obstacle to developing accurate representations of social organization. As Inca elites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Estrada-Belli. Alexandre Tokovinine.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chochkitam is a major ceremonial center in northeastern Petén, situated among sites with inscribed monuments such as Xultun, La Honradez, Río Azul in Guatemala, and La Milpa in Belize, giving us a few data points on the shifting political history of the Early and Late Classic periods. Since the discovery in 2021 of a carved frieze with a dedicatory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Uribe.

This is an abstract from the "Alfareros deste Inga: Pottery Production, Distribution and Exchange in the Tawantinsuyu" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A mediados de 1970 surgió la conocida discusión si el dominio incaico en el norte de Chile había sido directo o indirecto, a partir de la aplicación que se hizo del modelo sobre la "verticalidad" andina de John Murra. De acuerdo con esta propuesta, la situación se dirimía en términos de que cuán...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Longstaffe. Kyle Farquharson. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Felix Kupprat. Armando Anaya Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "New and Emerging Perspectives on the Bajo el Laberinto Region of the Maya Lowlands, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations at the Ximbal Che group at Yaxnohcah have documented intriguing new data with implications for understanding sociopolitical and economic integration in the Bajo el Laberinto region. These data include diverse cultural assemblages that show radical changes to the built...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keitlyn Alcantara.

Narratives of Aztec grandeur dominate portrayals of Late Postclassic (AD 1325-1519) Mesoamerica. While imperial influence spread rapidly and thoroughly throughout the central valleys, Tlaxcallan appears as a rift in imperial control, resisting the encircling empire. Aztec narratives relegate Tlaxcallan to the peripheries, downplaying Tlaxcaltecas as one-dimensional barbaric enemies, unconquered by choice. In contrast, ethnohistoric accounts from within Tlaxcallan emphasize a state that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Diane Slocum. Jaime Awe.

Xunantunich, an ancient Maya site in the Belize Valley, rose rapidly from a minor political center to a powerful regional polity during the Late Classic period (AD 600-900). Previous researchers suggested that this rapid rise was influenced by Xunantunich’s relationship with the more powerful polity of Naranjo in the nearby Petén Province of Guatemala. Their argument was based in part on a Late Classic period building program at Xunantunich resulting in a site layout that resembles that of sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachael Penfil. Kelita Pérez Cubas.

The Pisco Valley was an important node for the Inka empire’s control of what is now the southern coast of Peru, as evidenced by the presence of the large Inka administrative center of Tambo Colorado. This valley additionally would have been a strategic location for sociopolitical and economic exchanges between the Inka empire and the Chincha kingdom, whose capital is located just to the north in the Chincha Valley. This preliminary research utilizes survey data and GIS analyses to examine access...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Georganne Deen. John Pohl.

This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Xochipilli, the Flower Prince, was widely revered through various manifestations as the patron god of the noble classes throughout southern Mexico. As such he was credited with patronage over palaces, royal marriages, feasts, wealth finance, and belief in an exclusive elite afterlife and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Martínez-Carrasco. Constanza Cortes. Daniel Pavlovic. Cristian Dávila. Rodrigo Sánchez.

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Stories of the Inka Empire: Local Experiences of Ancient Imperialism" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Las evidencias indican que el uso de actividades de amplia convocatoria asociada a prácticas ceremoniales fue una estrategia fundamental para la integración de las cuencas de los ríos Aconcagua y Maipo-Mapocho (Chile central) al Tawantinsuyu. La cultura material permite inferir la participación de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sandra Balanzario Granados.

This is an abstract from the "New Light on Dzibanché and on the Rise of the Snake Kingdom’s Hegemony in the Maya Lowlands" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El asentamiento prehispánico de Dzibanché, se localiza en el Sur de Quintana Roo, tiene una extensión aproximada de 60 km2, superficie que incluye las áreas destinadas a la producción de alimentos y áreas habitacionales. Dzibanché fue el asiento de la dinastía Kaanu’l, durante el periodo del...