Political economy (Other Keyword)
51-75 (140 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich diversity of Andean ethnic and ecologic landscapes meant that exchange was essential to the economy of many prehispanic Andean societies. While exchange can and did take many forms (trade, vertical archipelago, reciprocity, centralized redistribution, etc.) one mechanism that has received relatively little attention is that of the feria or informal...
Human Plunder: The Role of Maya Slavery in Postclassic and Early Conquest Era Yucatán, 1450-1550 (2018)
Upon initial contact with the lowland Yucatec Maya, the Europeans discovered that a significant number of Maya slaves existed within the Maya communities that they encountered. War captives, orphans, and forced and enslaved sexual servants from the lower classes, Maya slaves and their possession became by the late Postclassic and early colonial period the major source of wealth and power of the traditional Maya Nobility. Divorced from control over specified traditional patrimonial landholdings...
Hydraulic Empire Revisited: Exploring the sociopolitical vulnerabilities of the riverine socio-ecological system of Pharaonic Egypt (2015)
Ever since the falsification of Wittfogel’s thesis on the role of centralized irrigation construction and administration in ancient Near Eastern states, most scholars of Pharaonic Egypt have found it taboo to theorize a relationship between irrigation-based productive systems and the Pharaonic political economy. A wealth of geoarchaeological and paleoclimatological proxy data has enabled the reconstruction of long term trends in Nile flood levels, highlighting not only the considerable...
Identifying the Archaeological Signatures of Inequality: An Analysis of Inequality at Late Formative La Joya and Bezuapan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents an analysis of artifact assemblage data from La Joya and Bezuapan, two late Formative Period (ca. 400 BC-AD 100) sites in southern Veracruz, Mexico. The study focuses on the ways in which wealth inequality is manifested in the archaeological record; wealth is defined here as the total of desirable factors consisting of two main categories...
The Illusion of Total Control in the Provinces of the Inca Empire (2016)
Despite the interest of the Inca empire in promoting their ideology and establishing a strong political economy in their provinces, the actual result of that process was full set of “trade-offs” that involved the empowerment of local elites, and the independent development of parallel economies of sumptuary goods and household provisioning. This proposition challenges current and dominant “top-down” approaches to the Inca empire, where all economic and political transformations are seen as a...
Impacts of Climate Change on Marginal Communities in the Archaeological Record (2022)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond the Shoreline: Heritage at Risk at Inland Sites" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the relationship between historical conditions of inequality in the archaeological record and climate-induced coastal erosion in the Southeast and Middle Atlantic regions. Recent studies have demonstrated that a significant number of archaeological sites will be affected by rising sea levels and...
Imported Imperialism: The Impact, Aftermath, and Lasting Political Legacy of Teotihuacan in the Maya Lowlands (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. The nature of Teotihuacan influence in the Maya Area has been a topic of enduring controversy. A growing corpus of evidence indicates direct political intervention by Teotihuacan across the Maya Lowlands starting in 378 CE facilitated through links with the Mutal Dynasty of Tikal. Emulation was...
Inca and Local Household Economic Interactions in the Chinchaysuyo, Asia Valley, Peru (2016)
Empires establish large scale interregional interaction networks with their provinces. Along with these large scale networks, pre-imperial small scale local economic interaction networks may continue (endure), diminish (decrease) or intensify (increase). Within this context, Imperial and local economic networks create a more complex web of interactions capable of been examined at the household level. In the Chinchaysuyo, the Inca conquered several coastal groups and established a range of...
The Inside/Outside Connection: A Spatial Analysis of Faunal Remains from Contact Period Maya Elite Structures at Lamanai, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating 20 Years of Support: Current Work by Recipients of the Dienje Kenyon Memorial Fellowship for Zooarchaeologists" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the colonial period, the Maya living in frontier zones retained much of their community-level sociocultural and hierarchical systems. At Lamanai, Belize, recent excavations of three elite residences provide an opportunity to examine the relationship between...
Investigating Market Activity at the Ancient Maya Site of Dos Hombres, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Finding evidence of an ancient Maya marketplace is difficult due to the perishability of telltale materials such as food, textiles, and wooden stalls in the tropical environment of northwestern Belize. Therefore, multiple lines of evidence including material culture, stratigraphy, soil chemistry, and spatial analysis are essential in identifying possible...
Iron Production at Marginal Settlements in Northern Iceland (2018)
The environment of Iceland was rapidly and severely affected by the Norse Settlement, in particular by deforestation. In Iceland’s changing environment the production of iron, an essential material, became limited not by access to iron ore but by availability of wood to make charcoal fuel. The large-scale production of iron may be one of the primary processes that led to deforestation in Iceland due to the large need for charcoal. Investigations at Stekkjarborg on the farm of Keldudalur in...
Is It Hot Enough Yet? Reconstructing Firing Temperatures for Prehistoric Honduran Ceramics through Re-Firing Experiments (2015)
Investigations conducted in the Naco valley and its environs within NW Honduras from 1975-2008 have revealed multiple facilities in which ceramic containers were fired. The vast majority of these date to the Late (AD 600-800) and Terminal Classic periods (AD 800-1000). Their diverse forms and dimensions hint at variations in aspects of production including the temperatures at which the vessels were heated and the degree of control artisans exercised over the manufacturing process. One line of...
Is the Study of Ancient Money Really So Difficult? (2018)
The difficulty that many economists and anthropologists have with studying ancient money lies with inadequate understanding of modern monetary systems. I briefly review the establishment of two currencies: the British pound in the 18th century and the US dollar in the 19th and why the establishment both currencies were political (not economic) constructs. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists analyze the current fiat currencies as political constructs and David Graber’s Debt: The First 5000...
Khmer Stoneware Ceramic Production and the Angkorian State (2017)
The Angkorian Khmer (900-1500 CE) manufactured an array of goods that materialized and celebrated political authority, from temples and religious statuary to ornaments and domestic tools. Khmer stoneware ceramics were one of the least spectacular and most ubiquitous of these, yet their distributional pattern deftly maps the geography of 9th – 15th century Angkorian rule. Archaeological research at Khmer stoneware kiln sites in the last two decades, coupled with excavations in Greater Angkor,...
Kukulkcan's Realm: Urban Life at Ancient Mayapan (2014)
Kukulcan's Realm chronicles the fabric of socioeconomic relationships and religious practice that bound the Postclassic Maya city of Mayapán's urban residents together for nearly three centuries. Presenting results of ten years of household archaeology at the city, including field research and laboratory analysis, the book discusses the social, political, economic, and ideological makeup of this complex urban center. Masson and Peraza Lope's detailed overview provides evidence of a vibrant...
Large Things Forgotten: The Hawaiian Monarchy’s Sailing Fleet, 1790–1840 (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Pacific Maritime History: Ships and Shipwrecks" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beginning in 1790, Hawaiian ali’i (royalty) appropriated Western sailing technology to facilitate fundamental transformations of interisland tributary systems, alliance building, exchange systems, and emergent forms of Indigenous capitalism. By 1840 ali’i had either built or purchased over 60 sailing vessels that we know the names of....
Large-Scale Production of Basic Commodities at Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, Guatemala: Implications for Ancient Maya Political Economy (2016)
Salinas de los Nueve Cerros is a major Precolumbian Maya city that grew around the only non-coastal salt source in the Maya lowlands. Residents of the city were able to transform the neighborhoods adjacent to and atop the salt dome into a large-scale production operation with the capacity to produce over 10,000 metric tons of salt a year, which were then distributed throughout the western lowlands via the Chixoy, Pasión, and Usumacinta river networks. By the Late Classic period, the city had...
Las Ruinas de Arenal and the Buenavista del Cayo Polity: Political Dynamics in the Western Belize River Valley (2018)
The socio-political and economic interactions of Las Ruinas de Arenal, a small but architecturally rich center in the lower Mopan River Valley, are explored through a focused investigation of select Classic period (250-850 CE) pottery from general occupation and special deposits. The study combines ceramic typological data with evaluations of artistic style and paste chemical composition. Previous archaeological investigations by Taschek and Ball found scant evidence of foreign influence in Las...
Lima Culture: Bridging Domestic and Political Economy (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Economies on the Andean Coast" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite having been central during the pioneer years of Andean archaeology, we understand little of the Lima Culture (circa AD 50–900). Is the Lima culture a political formation or several political formations that share a common territory? How was this society organized politically? On what was political power based in Lima society? Researchers...
Limited Territorial Control and Incomplete Political Economies in Small States: A Look at the Classic Maya and Classic Greek (2018)
The limited territorial control of small states, here the Classic Maya, has hindered the development of political economies in several cases. This paper looks at the issue of non-ruling elite interstate economic and political networks, and their effect on the evolution of internal political economies for the Classic Maya. Examples will be drawn from such polities as Copan, El Palmar, and Caracol. A further window into the dynamics of the effect of limited territorial control on political...
A Lithic Approach to Economic Organization at Piedras Negras, Guatemala (2018)
Analysis of the production of imported lithic artifacts, especially obsidian and jade, has been important to recent research on the economic organization of the lowland Maya. However, the data for lithic production has come from a few key sites with clear evidence of workshops devoted to the working of such materials. Less attention has been dedicated to the diversity of obsidian and jade working within individual sites, much less across a given kingdom. This paper presents preliminary evidence...
Livestock Economy and the Emergence of Urbanism in Central Italy during the Iron Age and Archaic Period (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses subsistence specialization, livestock mobility, and husbandry strategies at Gabii during the eighth–fifth centuries BCE, a time of transition to state-level, urbanized political systems. The site of Gabii is one of several emerging cities in the Lower Tiber Valley that grew along a similar trajectory, expanding from dispersed hut...
Local Political Economies at Angamuco, Michoacán: Insights from Ceramic Archaeometry (2018)
A key goal in the study of ancient artifacts is determining their provenance. Such information can provide insight into the production and consumption of artifacts, but may also inform discussions about local political economies. Our study uses qualitative optical petrography and geochemical analysis (NAA) to evaluate the tempers and paste recipes in ceramic fragments and raw clays from Angamuco, located in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán. Angamuco was occupied before and throughout the...
Mahan Political Economy: Evidence from Ceramic Geochemistry (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging data from the Mahan cultures of South Korea are fundamentally changing our understanding of this complex society and its relationship with Korea's early states. Using INAA data on ceramic geochemistry, patterns of production traditions and trade relationships reveal a political...
Mapping Obsidian Exchange Networks in Central Mexico from the Late Postclassic Periods (900-1519CE) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study examines the differentiation of obsidian exploitation between large centers and domestic settlements in the region of Puebla-Tlaxcala. The results of pXRF analysis of obsidian artifacts from the surface and excavated materials from three single occupation sites are compared to pXRF studies of the larger centers of Tepeticpac and Cholula. This study...