Political economy (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Bayman.

The analysis of material correlates to interpret cross-cultural variation in ancient political economies is a conventional and time-honored tradition in world archaeology. The material correlates that archaeologists use to gauge degrees of social stratification include evidence of subsistence intensification, hierarchical settlement patterns, craft specialization, large-scale monumentality, and differentiated mortuary programs. Ironically, recent claims for the rise of ancient states in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandre Tokovinine.

This paper considers textual and visual evidence of debt among Classic Maya nobles. It begins with an overview of lexical data and summarizes specific references to payment and accounting. The argument proceeds to some less obvious contexts such as ‘just-so’ myths, which reveal a notion of primordial transactions and gifts to be repaid in perpetuity. Finally, the paper considers the movement of inscribed objects. The argument is that giving those essentially inalienable possessions marked...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Classic Maya economies, artifact distributions alone do not neatly reflect modes of production and exchange. The simultaneous existence of multiple modes of production (domestic, specialized, ritualized, etc.) and exchange (gift giving, tribute extraction, and markets) in households complicate our understanding of the strength of any given aspect. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Blitz. Lisa LeCount.

Understanding the political economy of ancient Maya communities requires reconstructing the forms and scales of exchange, the articulated nature of exchange modes, and the degree to which elites controlled commoner access to goods. These issues are examined at the site of Actuncan, Belize, by documenting the chronology, morphology, raw material, and social context of a large sample of groundstone manos and metates distributed across structures ranging from a palace to large houses to patio...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Kroot.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The shift from primarily foraging to predominantly farming economies that occurs during the early Neolithic of southwest Asia is commonly seen as a transition not merely in subsistence practices but economic relations as well. Many researchers argue that new forms of households emerge by the end of this time period, which serve as both residential and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Graves.

Examining household-level economic behaviors has long been a means for archaeologists to explore social and political organization in ancient Hohokam society. In this presentation, I reflect on the training and influence of Katherine Spielmann in my thinking about the economic roots of inequality in small- scale societies and begin to outline an explicitly political-economic framework to explore the structure and bases of power among the Hohokam of southern Arizona. The Hohokam household was the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kasia Szremski.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Chuchiak IV.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rudolf Cesaretti.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Puente. Philip Arnold.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Garrido.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine G. Parker. Brigid M. Ogden. Jordan L. Schaefer. Rebecca J. Webster.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ancira Emily Baca Marroquin. Clorinda Orbegoso.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianne Boileau.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Kowalewski.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For key agricultural resources, people form and refine social institutions of property tailored to biophysical constraints and affordances of the local environment. As known from indigenous texts and practices, and a large body of historical research, in Oaxaca—and by extension Mesoamerica and beyond—intensive terracing, irrigation, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Conley. Rissa Trachman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Zeitlin.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Del Giudice. Patricia Urban. Edward Schortman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rosenswig.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer. Darith Ea.

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,...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Marilyn A. Masson. Carlos Peraza Lope.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Mills.

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....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brent Woodfill.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dorie Reents-Budet. Ronald L. Bishop. Joseph Ball. Jennifer Taschek.

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...