Social and Political Organization: States and Empires (Other Keyword)
101-115 (115 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the nature of northern Maya lowland statecraft, politics, and kingship and how they differ and parallel that of the southern lowlands. In keeping with the goal of the symposium this paper focuses on the concept of “regime” recognizing the Maya, especially when considering the northern and southern areas, created distinct political...
Styles, Technology and Identities: Origins and Uses of Provincial Inca Ceramics in Pueblo Viejo-Pucará, a Huarochiri’s Mitmaquna Settlement in the Lurin Valley (2018)
Distribution analysis of provincial Inca pottery in different layers of the residences of Pueblo Viejo-Pucará, including the palace of the curaca, will serve as a starting point to define the differences in access to diverse vessel forms and observe the contexts of use in domestic, funeral, public and ceremonial areas. The excavations in residential and ceremonial architecture carried out in Pueblo Viejo-Pucará, a Late Horizon (1470-1560 A.D.) urban settlement, provided rich and varied evidence...
Surveillance and Intelligence Gathering in the Urartian and Assyrian Empires (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), two distinct fortified landscape styles had developed in western Asia: fortifications surrounding grand urban complexes and the "fortified regional network" (FRN), a rural, regional system comprising fortresses, forts, towers, and other structures situated along roads and...
Taking the Palace out of Palatial Control (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hierarchical models of political and economic organization still pervade the scholarship of complex societies in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. This is especially the case for those societies such as Late Bronze Age Greece identified as “palatial” in which the palace and its officials are accorded near complete control over the economy. There is much...
The Team for the New Age: Naranjo and Holmul under Kaanul’s Sway (2021)
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. The paper presents the results of the last decade of archeological and epigraphic research that clarify the history of the reigns of Holmul and Naranjo during the expansion of the Dzibanché dynasty in eastern Petén in the second half of the sixth century and the first half of the seventh century...
Territorial and Border Surveillance in the Greek World (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Greek world formed a giant mosaic of city-states and leagues stretching over the entire Mediterranean and delimited by political borders. Like today, crossing a border was not innocuous, as states imposed their rule of law and enforced strict surveillance over their territories. This paper examines archaeological...
To walk in order to remember… and to dominate: Inca Roads and Hegemonic Processes in Jauja, Central Highlands of Peru (2018)
Previous research on the Inca road system have generally developed functionalist perspectives on their associated characteristics and infrastructure, inherited in several cases from procesualist approaches that focused primarily on their economic and military role. However, more recent studies on the nature of the Inca state have varied substantially, granting an outstanding importance to ideology and religion as mechanisms of domination. Based on these considerations, this paper presents an...
Upstairs, Downstairs: Excavations of a Throne Room and Kitchen in the Kuche Palace, Kiuic, Yucatán (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project: 25 Years of Research in the Puuc" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning around AD 800 the Puuc region experienced a major construction boom of monumental architecture, including large palace complexes. At Kiuic, in the Bolonchen region of the Puuc, the early Yaxché Palace (AD 550–800) was replaced by a much larger complex of structures, still under construction at the...
Vínculos (in)visibles: Relationships of Power in the Colesuyo during the Inca Empire (2018)
It has been suggested that Inca colonization strengthened kin bonds between ayllu members while at the same time requested tribute by means of establishing "fictive" kin affiliations. Therefore, subjugated populations response to Inca imperialism caused the consolidation of local and regional identities. However, what occurred in the Colesuyo? Colesuyo region of southern Peru, inhabited by multi-ethnic small-scale groups –the Cochunas from the upper Moquegua Valley and the Coles and Camanchacas...
Wari and the Southern Peruvian Coast: A Reevaluation (2021)
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. The coast of southern Peru from the Nasca to Moquegua has played a pivotal role in distinct interpretation of the Wari polity. A hard imperial frontier, for example, ran through the region in 1960s models. Nasca and Moquegua were home to important administrative centers in the “mosaic of...
The Wari Occupation of the Site of Kaninkunka in the Cusco Region of Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nature of Wari presence in the Cusco region of southern Peru during the Middle Horizon (600-1000 CE) is debated. In this area, the Wari state built large installations at Pikillaqta and in the neighboring Huaro Valley. Excavations in the Wari colony have demonstrated the strong Wari identity of its occupants along with their political ambitions, while...
Where is Camaxtli? Assessing the Iconography of Tlaxcallan Collective Government (2018)
Scholars have acknowledged, for many decades, that Late Postclassic Tlaxcalla (n1250/1300-1519 A.D.) was a state level political entity ruled by a form of collective government having Camaxtli as its main patron deity. Both conceptions are constantly reproduced in academic work although they derive explicitly from sixteenth century historical sources. Unfortunately, few works have undertaken the task of contrasting colonial writings against archaeological evidence in order to test if such...
Who Founded Quilcapampa? Wari Agents, Social Network Analysis, and the Unfurling of a Middle Horizon State (2018)
At the beginning of the ninth century AD, a Wari-affiliated settlement was founded in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru. Celebrants ritually smashed face-necked jars when they abandoned the site less than a century later. These vessels likely represent elites or ethnic groups in the Wari sphere - agents whose associations in conflict or cooperation can be used to tell a more dynamic story of the founding of Quilcapampa during this turbulent era of Wari state expansion. This paper uses social...
Why Heterarchy? A View from the Tiwanaku State’s (AD 500-1100) Labor Force. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cooperative Bodies: Bioarchaeology and Non-ranked Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When past peoples congregated to form complex societies, a question arises as to under what circumstances would heterarchical, reciprocal labor be emphasized over top-down hierarchical configurations? In the Central Andes of South America, modern indigenous people practice reciprocal labor with groupings organized around family...
Women in the Nexus of State Power in the Oyo Empire (2023)
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. Women’s work and administrative leadership were essential to the running of the Oyo Empire (ca. AD 1570–1836). As wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, enslaved and free bureaucrats, traders, artisans, and laborers, women played a wide range of roles in palace administration and in financing and reproducing the state (materially...