Political economy (Other Keyword)
76-100 (161 Records)
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 Organization in Imperial Settings: Evidence from Late Antique and Middle Islamic Dhiban, Jordan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the many intellectual legacies of Richard Redding’s work is his exploration of how local communities made provisioning decisions to meet both their own local needs and demands by political authorities. This paper examines these themes among inhabitants of ancient Dhiban, Jordan during the Late...
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...
Macrobotanical Analysis of Archaeological Excavations at the Moundville (1Tu500) Riverbank (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project looks at plant remains from an archaeological site, Moundville (1Tu500), in the Black Warrior River Valley of west central Alabama. Over centuries of occupation (AD 1020-1650), the people of the Black Warrior River Valley experienced profound changes in population size and social organization. Signatures of past peoples co-mediating...
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...
Mapping Terraces, Mapping Agricultural Practice in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Lake Titicaca basin of southern Peru, agronomic systems were finely tuned over millennia to the high-altitude environment, an ever-oscillating climate, and dynamic cultural regimes. To succeed in these conditions, prehistoric farmers transformed steep hillsides into viable agricultural land by modifying them into massive agricultural terrace complexes....
Marginal Lives and Fractured Families. The Hidden Archaeology of Household Debt and Instability in Medieval Iceland (2018)
Archaeologists generally assume that the absence of market exchange implies an absence of financial debt as a mechanism of exchange and social control found in more "advanced" economies. This implicit logic is reproduced in contexts where identifying market exchange largely relies on tracking the circulation of specialized and imported goods, as is the case in medieval Iceland: a society largely made up of subsistence tenant farmers where archaeological indicators of market exchange virtually...
Matters of Scale: Depositional Processes and the Archaeology of Daily Life at Bacon’s Castle (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Taphonomy in Focus: Current Approaches to Site Formation and Social Stratigraphy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Home to Virginia’s oldest standing house, the Bacon’s Castle site is the most visible remnant of a (post)colonial landscape, continuously occupied as such since at least the 1640s. The extant portion alone, where archaeology has concentrated, has been inhabited over multiple generations by a complex...
The Maya Economy: Dual? Integrated? Embedded? Or All of the Above? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Embedded Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we argue that the complexity of Maya economic structures and the debates that ensue over their interpretation stem from the fact that manifestations of those economic structures vary so greatly across time and space in the precolumbian Maya world. Maya economies were both dichotomized along elite and commoner lines, while also integrated in...
Maya Obsidian Production and Exchange in the Southern Belize Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Permanent occupation of inland southern Belize began at the dawn of the Classic period and continued into the Terminal Classic. Excavations at Pusilha, Lubaantun, and Nim li Punit have recovered more than 5,000 obsidian artifacts that date to these periods. These have all been sourced using portable XRF and subject to metric and attribute analyses....
Metal Trade and Interregional Dynamics of the Mesoamerican Late Postclassic Period (2015)
The way people were placed in relation to each other was fundamental to the distinctive character of Mesoamerica, as a historically linked series of socially stratified, economically differentiated, complex societies. Long-distance exchange, one of the practices through which intensive interaction between different peoples was fostered, was centrally concerned with obtaining materials used for marking distinctions between commoners and nobles. Costume was a major means of marking distinctions...
Middle Preclassic Greenstone Caches from Paso del Macho, Yucatan (2018)
Complex ritual deposits dating to the Middle Preclassic period are rarely encountered in Yucatan, and typically have only been recovered from disturbed contexts. Excavations along the center axes in the plaza of the Middle Preclassic village of Paso del Macho in the Puuc region of Yucatan have yielded a series of offerings spanning from the early Middle Preclassic to the cusp of the Late Preclassic. Three different floor sequences were each associated with several offerings. The forms of the...
Minding the Gaps: Exploring the intersection of political economies, colonial ideologies, and cultural practices in early modern Ireland. (2016)
Examinations of the imposition of colonial ideologies actualised through the mechanism of plantation, or enforced settlement, in Ireland often highlight plantation as a stark process that was founded upon, and thus fully accommodated to, a fully-fledged version of mercantile capitalism. Yet on the ground, engagements between peoples reveal that ideologies were incompletely applied, plantation plans seldom realised, and new economic formulations incompletely rendered. On close examination,...
Money Grows on Trees: Arboricultural Proxies and Engendering Ancient Maya Finance (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Among the Classic and Postclassic period Maya, cacao beans were one of the most common forms of currency. Ancient Maya art depicts this money, which grows on trees, as tribute in courtly scenes most often populated by men. Yet contact period ethnohistoric documents consistently attribute ownership of trees to women. While contemporary...
Mountains, Obsidian, and Power in Classic Mesoamerica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...
Nahua Diaspora and Cacao (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant amount of archaeological evidence demonstrates that Late Postclassic Mesoamericans exchanged cacao intensively and over long distances. A reason for high-volume cacao commerce in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the expansion of its use from a ritual offering and the ingredient in socially important...
Nahua Merchants in a Tarascan World (2015)
A major enemy of the Aztecs during the Late Postclassic Period, the Tarascan State nevertheless exchanged key commodities within the Mesoamerican world by means of markets, local and long-distance traders, and gift exchange. Sixteenth century documents known since the 19th c have indicated that Nahua merchants exchanged goods with Purepecha merchants at major Tarascan fortified frontier settlements such as Taximaroa. However new research on recently translated documents and new archaeological...
Neither Contact nor Colonial: Seneca Iroquois Local Political Economies, 1675-1754 (2016)
Fine-grained attention to the material conditions of indigenous daily lives over time reveals myriad changes completely incapable of being explained by models such as "traditional sameness" or "acculturative change." Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) sites were occupied for only 15-40 years before planned abandonment, so examining a sequence of these sites provides an excellent way to look at change over time. This paper examines local dynamics at three Seneca sites, illustrating strategic Seneca...
A New Method for Monitoring Socio-Economic Changes through Settlement Placement (2018)
There is a recursive relationship between socio-economic institutions and the environment. Decisions about where to place settlements in a landscape were informed by existing economic institutions, but placement of sites in turn effected how social and economic institutions were organized. In this paper, I present a new GIS-based method for quantifying socio-economic organization and change in prehistoric societies. Catchment analyses, as employed in this study, define the availability of...
Obsidian Exchange and Use in Early Formative Chalcatzingo (2018)
In the Middle Formative, Chalcatzingo was one of Highland Mexico’s dominant settlements. At its peak, Chalcatzingo had a well-developed obsidian blade technology and established lines of trade with the Gulf Coast. Chalcatzingo’s role in the exchange of obsidian in earlier periods is less well understood. This paper combines geochemical sourcing and technological analysis of an Early Formative obsidian assemblage from Chalcatzingo in order to elucidate this role. Geochemical sourcing enables a...
Obsidian Procurement in the Northern Tiwa Homeland (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Collaborative Archaeology at Picuris Pueblo: The New History" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present results of a large-scale geochemical sourcing study of obsidian artifacts from Picuris Pueblo. We compare those results to obsidian-sourcing data from other sites on the Taos Plateau and in the Rio Chama basin. At Picuris Pueblo, almost all obsidian artifacts were produced on Valles Rhyolite or Cerro Toledo...