Political economy (Other Keyword)
1-25 (140 Records)
Front E of the Project Plaza of the Columns Complex comprises the southern sector of this large civic-administrative complex, located in the heart of Teotihuacan. In initial project planning, its surface topography suggested the presence of open spaces and low structures that could have been used for activities of economic significance and/or as residential spaces for individuals not of high elite rank. Excavations over two seasons in Front E prioritized horizontal exposures in order to assess...
Adjustment and Adaptation On the Northern Plains: The Case of Equestrianism Among the Hidatsa (1986)
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African Power Plays: Inland Beads, Shells, and Shell Beads in Tanzania, AD 700-1350 (2016)
This paper grapples with seemingly mundane objects frequently encountered, but largely ignored, in East African archaeology: beads and shells. I report on beads of various materials, shells, and other residues identified during systematic research in hinterland NE Tanzania, AD 700-1350. Finds of glass and stone beads with Indian Ocean origins and local beads of landsnail shell alter, in a meaningful manner, archaeological views of oceanic ties to interior East Africa. Material patterning...
An Analysis of Ceramic Compositions from Canchas Uckro, Ancash, Peru: Implications for Trade in the Formative Andes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Canchas Uckro (ca. 1100-850 BC) is a large monumental platform situated above the Puccha River approximately 25 km north of Chavín de Huántar. Recent excavations have revealed monumental features that suggest the Canchas Uckro played an important role within the political landscape. Ceramic analysis has likewise linked the site to broader economic spheres of...
Ancient Maya Elite Political-Economic Practices at La Milpa North, Northwestern Belize (2015)
Archaeological research has increasingly revealed the role of elite labor and influence in ancient Maya political economies. Rising awareness of the complexity of ancient Maya socioeconomic organization and attention to households as loci of production has led to new understandings of the structures and practices of production within elite households and the position of elite individuals in relations of production that extend beyond their households. Status-enhancing material goods of elite...
Angkor from the Outside In: Incorporation into the Angkorian State as Seen through the Distribution of Stoneware Ceramics (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Incorporation into and connectivity within the Angkorian state (ninth–fifteenth centuries CE) has been studied through the construction of large temples and road/water networks across sites in mainland Southeast Asia (e.g., Hendrickson 2008, 2010; Pottier et al. 2012). However, few scholars have examined how areas...
Animal Economies and Emergent Complexity in the European Bronze Age (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Bronze Age is marked by dramatic social changes throughout much of the Old World. In Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, we see the emergence of regional hierarchies characterized by political and economic centralization and heightened status differentiation. While focus traditionally has been placed on the manufacture and exchange of metals, significant...
Approaching (In)Equality in the Indus Civilization: A Preliminary Analysis of House Size at Mohenjo-daro (2023)
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. The archaeology of South Asia challenges theories about the deep history of inequality, but data from its first cities are rarely included in comparative studies. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a preliminary analysis of spatial data produced by the early twentieth-century...
Archaeological Survey of Colonial Dominica (2017)
The Archaeological Survey of Colonial Dominica centered household production, provisioning, and consumption in the relationship between colonies and metropoles. This paper introduces this session, which develops an approach that considers the political economy of colonial empires at the human scale. As a site of imperial contention between Britain and France, Dominica’s material record can help examine the similarities and differences in how land, labor and commerce was imagined in the homeland...
Archaeology and Contemporary Capitalism (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hamilakis and Duke first considered the relationship between "Archaeology and Capitalism" in 2007. In the intervening decade, contemporary capitalism has changed vastly, relocating and concentrating wealth and economic power, constraining national sovereignty in globalized markets, disrupting industries through...
Archaeology of the Town Square and the Emergence of Democracy in the Phoenician Mediterranean (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Popular government, or “democracy,” spread from Lebanon to the rest of the Mediterranean in the early first millennium BC. This form of state-level, consensus-based sociopolitical organization emerged as a face-to-face practice where members or citizens witnessed and participated in communal debates and decisions. While the...
Assessing Ancient Vertical Integration: Copper Production in Early Bronze Age Southern Levant (2015)
In the later part of the Early Bronze Age (~2800 BCE - 2500 BCE) the collapse of the first "urban" settlements was beginning. That collapse led to a period predominantly identified with ruralism and pastoralism, the Early Bronze IV (~2500 BCE - 2000 BCE). Within this context, the site of Khirbat Hamra Ifdan (KHI) was founded and sustained as a copper manufactory in the peripheral Faynan district of southern Jordan, unprecedented in scale and close to the source of copper ore. Before the...
Between Angkor and Champa: Political Economy of the Buffer Zone (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highland Southeast Asia was historically the domain of ethnic swiddeners, in contrast with the wet rice farmers of lowland states. Recent scholarship has re-envisioned these upland groups as active agents who resisted lowland state domination, rather than viewing them as isolated tribal groups. Highlands located east of...
Between consumption and extermination: archaeologies of modern imperialism (2013)
In this introduction to the session, an outline of the existing and possible archaeologies of imperialism will be sketched. Emphasis will be put on the potential of archaeology to construct alternative narratives on Western colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It will be argued that this kind of archaeology has to take into account violence (both physical and symbolic), but also forms of hybridization, war as well as trade and exchange, open and subtle resistance, and hegemonic...
Between the South Sea and the Mountainous Ridges: Coerced Assemblages and Biopolitical Ecologies in the Spanish Colonial Americas (2016)
Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated. This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession, and the disciplining of labor and dynamic biopolitical ecologies of assemblage, coercion, and accumulation. ...
Billions of Dollars: Calculating the Size of the Heritage Compliance Sector (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The presenters, through their companies Landward Research and Heritage Business International, produce annual reports on the size of the heritage compliance or commercial archaeology sectors in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and worldwide. These reports show the enormous scale of commercial archaeology—hundreds of millions of dollars are...
Breathtaking Landscapes, Big Questions, and Fabulous Feasts: Celebrating the Contributions of Dr. Charles Stanish (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this introductory paper, we celebrate Dr. Stanish’s impact from both personal and professional angles. We review some of the major contributions of Dr. Stanish’s career over four immensely productive decades, including long-term research projects in several regions and “big ideas” that have significantly influenced Andean...
Centralized Power/Decentralized production? Angkorian Stoneware and the Southern Production Complex of Cheung Ek, Cambodia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, international archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has been typically site-focused and ‘origins’ oriented (e.g., agriculture, metalworking). Theoretical framing has been inductive, frequently emphasizing the role of migration in culture change. More recently, interest in the...
Change and Continuity in Agricultural Production in Iraqi Kurdistan, ca. 4000 BCE–1000 CE (2018)
The archaeological site of Kani Shaie is a small (<3ha) tell site located in Iraqi Kurdistan not far from contemporary Sulaymaniyah. Archaeological evidence as well as radiocarbon dates procured from excavations at the site indicate in-habitation from at least 3500 BCE until the Middle Islamic period, ca. 1400 CE. Excavations in 2015 and especially 2016 included a substantial archaeobotanical sampling component, which entailed the sampling of every archaeological deposit and the subsequent...
Commercialization, Consumption, and Political-Economic Strategies in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica: A Comparative Study of Access to Projectile Points at Tlaxcallan and Santa Rita Corozal (2018)
Over the course of the Postclassic Period (A.D. 950 – 1521), commercialization was on the rise in ancient Mesoamerica, reaching its apex at the time of contact with Europeans. Extant information indicates that both interregional trade and regional market integration increased during this time, especially during the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1250/1300 – 1521). Yet, researchers have little comparative published information on household consumption from well-excavated residential contexts for this...
"Commodification", Exchange, and Changes in Maya Political Economy on the Eve of the Classic Maya Collapse (2016)
Initial hypotheses on the port gateway city of Cancuen envisioned it functioning within a “normal” Classic Maya economy, albeit with a particular emphasis on import/export of sacred goods, (e.g. jade, pyrite, probably quetzal feathers). After 15 years of excavation and intensive lithic and ceramic studies, however, it appears that after 760 A.D. Cancuen shifted to a different form of economy almost entirely based on commodities production and long-distance exchange. Evidence demonstrates massive...
Comparative Analysis of Imperial Inca Pottery from Ecuador using INAA (2019)
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. An enduring question in Inca archaeology concerns the issue of imperial pottery production. Inca ceramics, which are found across an enormous expanse of Andean South America, are known for their high degree of uniformity in vessel form, proportionality, and embellishment. How did the Inca manage the...
Crafting Chert Commodities at Santa Cruz, Yucatan, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "An Exchange of Ideas: Recent Research on Maya Commodities" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses chert crafting at the site of Santa Cruz in northern Yucatan. Santa Cruz was a small town located only about 25 km from both Chichen Itza and Ek Balam and occupied almost exclusively during the Late/Terminal Classic period when both these cities were at their height. Surface collections in 2017 and...
Creating the Pax Tolteca: Diversity, Autonomy, and Centralization from the Epiclassic to the Early Postclassic Periods in the Northern Basin of Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper studies the role that economic and ecological diversity plays in the establishment of communities, the maintenance of sociopolitical autonomy, and the centralization of regional state power. We focus on the transition from the Epiclassic period in the northern Basin of Mexico, a time...
Debt and Obligation in Ancient Maya Political Economies (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The notion of debt pervades anthropological discussion of political economy and exchange. Often used as a descriptor of unequal relationships it also embodies notions of reciprocity, expectation, and mutuality. Debt carries with it a charged negativity in many contexts, conveying experiences of precarity and violence, pressure and visibility. However, debt can...