Social Complexity (Other Keyword)
1-25 (53 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Aguada Fénix and the Middle Usumacinta Region: Interregional Interactions and Social Transformations in the Middle Preclassic Period" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The recently discovered site of Aguada Fenix in eastern Tabasco, Mexico is one of the largest monumental constructions in Mesoamerica. It was built in a standardized architectural pattern that we call the Middle Formative Usumacinta Pattern (MFU). Its...
As Good as it Sounds: Archaeology of Las Delicias, Managua, Nicaragua (2015)
In 2008, housing development on the shore of Lake Xolotlan in a suburb of Managua discovered an extensive cemetery dating to the Late Tempisque period, ca. 1300 CE. Dozens of individuals were recovered, along with a rich array of grave goods. A new phase of development in 2014 has been closely monitored by the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture. In July heavy machinery exposed a number of additional skeletons and a team from the University of Calgary volunteered to assist in the excavation...
A Bayesian Radiocarbon Chronology for Southern Appalachia, A.D. 700-1400 (2016)
Advances in radiometric dating and statistical analyses are having a substantial impact on the archaeology of eastern North America, especially through the achievement of high precision intrasite chronologies. While detailed intrasite dynamics are invaluable to advancing understandings of rapid cultural change, more refined and empirically constructed regional histories are also necessary. An integrated regional Bayesian chronology is presented for Southern Appalachia using extant radiometric...
A Bottom-Up Approach to Understanding Changes in Social Complexity during the Prehistoric Bronze Age on Cyprus (2015)
For at least the last 5,000 years, competition for social and economic control led to the acquisition of social power and wealth by some individuals or groups and the emergence of complex social systems. This paper will present the preliminary results of a larger study intended to identify the changing network structures that underlie society at the household, village and regional scales and led to the emergence of social complexity as a system level phenomenon during the Prehistoric Bronze Age...
Building Social Complexity: Differences in Bedrock Use at Early Formative Etlatongo in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Construction materials such as earthen fills have frequently been an afterthought for many archaeologists interested in understanding past social relations in Mesoamerica. In this paper we reconcile this situation by assessing how the relationship between humans and materials, in regard to the use of construction fills, may have played out a significant role...
Burial Excavations in Plaza 1 of Los Pilarillos, Zacatecas, Mexico, 1997 Season (1998)
Fieldwork from the 1997 season at Los Pilarillos.
Colonial Stigma in ‘Post’-Colonial Archaeology (2017)
Legacies of archaeological social complexity models continue to stigmatize living Native communities. Pervasive in discussions of pre-Contact peoples in the modern United States, these models rely on the Eurocentric foundations steeped in racism, sexism, and religious bigotry on which they were built during early colonization. Archaeological evidence provides the opportunity to interrogate how past peoples were and continue to be entangled with living communities, rather than to buttress myopic,...
Complexity and Scale in the Study of Fisher-Gatherer-Hunters: An Example from the Eastern United States. In: Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers (1985)
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Context database of artifact counts for spaces in which board games were found in Bronze Age Cyprus (2014)
This dataset contains artifact counts for every space in Bronze Age Cypriot settlements in which game boards were found. Artifact classes are explained in: Crist, Walter. 2016. Games of Thrones: Board Games and Social Complexity in Bronze Age Cyprus. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University.
Cosmology in the New World
This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.
Decoupling Decoration and Dates: A New Absolute Chronology for the Transylvanian Middle Bronze Age (2015)
Metal from southwest Transylvania fueled the development of inequality and regional polities across Eastern Europe during the Bronze Age. However, little is known about the communities in the resource-rich region. Through regional survey, test excavation, and digitization of existing collections, the Bronze Age Transylvania Survey (BATS) Project seeks to understand the long-term dynamics of social organization throughout the Middle Bronze Age in southwest Transylvania (2000-1400 BC). A robust...
Developing Perspectives on Tonto Basin Prehistory (1992)
This monograph is a collection of papers presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans. These papers present preliminary results after two years of work on the eight year mitigation program investigating Salado Platform Mound Villages in the Tonto Basin, Arizona. Each paper constitutes an individual chapter. They include: 1. Introduction 2. Pursuing Southwestern Social Complexity in the 1990s 3. Modeling the Development of Complexity in the...
Does Increasing Social Complexity Buffer Energy Consumption from the Effects of High Frequency Climate Variation? A Western European Case Study (2018)
Humans, like any other organism, must continuously adapt to or modify their surrounding environment to maximize their fitness. One of the main sources of environmental variation that humans must cope with is climate variation. Adjustment to climate variation may include increasing investments in infrastructure (social, technological, cognitive), which acts as a buffer, filtering out the effects of higher frequency climate variation on the ability of individuals and populations to consume energy,...
Early Formative Public Architecture and Corporate Identity in the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca (2017)
Public spaces appeared early in Mesoamerica, often linked to emerging communal identity and/or socio-political complexity. Their construction, and subsequent maintenance and renovations, reflect the collective effort of different social actors and corporate entities. In Mesoamerica, public space first appears during the Early Formative period (1500-900 BCE), a time of emerging socio-political complexity at sites such as San Lorenzo, San Jose Mogote, and Paso de la Amada. The arrangement and...
Early polities in the steppes: Sintashta communities of southern Russia (2017)
First polities in the Eurasian steppes are documented by the Greek and Chinese historical accounts of the Scythians (9th-3rd centuries BC) and the Xiongnu (3rd century BC – 1st century AD). Archaeologically, these entities manifested themselves in complex settlement networks, consisting of fortified sites, dispersed farmsteads, and mobile pastoral camps. Earlier roots of political organization in the Eurasian steppes are largely limited to funerary and ceremonial monuments, which presumably...
El Potrerito Midden 1 Coring Field Notes (1998)
Scanned copy of field notes recording the core sampling within Midden 1 at the site of El Potrerito.
Entangled complexity: Spiro, religion, and food (2017)
Understanding past peoples – those living in different places, spaces and times – requires archaeologists to reorient how we see and experience the world. We have the ability to move beyond recording the physical traces of past lives to get to the central goal of our discipline – understanding how people lived, participated in and tied themselves to communities, and connected to larger systems. Instead of forming stagnant images of the past, we need to remember the dynamism of choices made and...
Evolution of Elite Residence at San Martín Tilcajete, 500-100 B.C. (2017)
Between 1995 and 2014, we directed 11 seasons of horizontal excavation in and around the main plazas of two Formative Period sites, El Mogote and El Palenque, near San Martín Tilcajete in the Oaxaca Valley. Our results indicate that major changes occurred in public architecture and elite residence between the Early Monte Albán I phase (500-300 B.C.) occupation at El Mogote and the Late Monte Albán I phase (300-100 B.C.) site of El Palenque. In view of the evidence of fundamental cultural...
Expressions of Ideology and the Consolidation of Social Complexity through Jade and Jadeite Material Culture in Precolumbian Costa Rica (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Costa Rican precolumbian jade, jadeite, and greenstone artifacts from the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, this study aims to amplify and widen the range of research carried out on the Isthmo-Colombian Area. It particularly seeks to examine and discuss the role of those objects as indicators of rank and prestige as...
Feeding the Ranks: correlating social organization and dietary patterns at the Yukisma Mound (CA-SCL-38) (2015)
The Yukisma Mound (CA-SCL-38), located in Santa Clara County, California, was used by the ancestral Ohlone as a mortuary site between approximately 940 and 230 years BP. Analysis of mortuary contexts within the mound revealed evidence of social differentiation in wealth, prestige, moiety affiliation and power. Special mortuary treatment, artifact abundance, and association with costly artifacts or culturally significant wealth items suggested that some individuals held higher status than...
Food and Religious Practices at Spiro: Implications for Understanding Social Complexity (2016)
Recent reanalyzes of the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere have invoked reinvigorated, multi-dimensional research that examines symbolism, social organization, and subsistence practices. Through a reanalysis of faunal remains from Spiro Mounds, OK, this paper interrogates the presence of faunal remains and materials to better contextualize their use through a lens of concurrent religious practices at the site from CE 1000-1400. By contextualizing the remains within broader discussions...
Games of Thrones: Board Games and Social Complexity in Bronze Age Cyprus
This study frames research on board games within a body of anthropological theory and method to examine the long-term social changes that effect play and mechanisms through which play may influence societal change. Drawing from ethnographic literature focusing on the performative nature of games and their effectiveness at providing a method for strengthening social bonds through grounding, I examine changes in the places in which people engaged in play over the course of the Bronze Age on...
Historical Ecology: An Approach to the Investigation of Ancient Human-Environmental Interactions in the Horn of Africa (2017)
Recent archaeological survey, excavation, ethnoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental research conducted in northeastern Tigrai by the Eastern Tigrai Archaeological Project (ETAP) has produced new insights into the Pre-Aksumite and Aksumite periods (>800 BCE-CE 700). The principal ETAP excavations thus far include the Pre-Aksumite site of Mezber (1600 BCE-1CE) and Ona Adi (c. early 1st millennium CE) which was inhabited during the Pre-Aksumite to Aksumite transition. Both sites were occupied...
Houses of Power: Community Houses and Specialized Houses as Markers of Social Complexity in the Pre-Contact Society Island Chiefdoms (2017)
World-wide, communal houses and specialized houses represent hallmarks of social complexity. In pre-contact Society Island chiefdoms, social complexity was materially marked by architectural differences between elite and commoner residences. Yet perhaps more pronounced are architectural differences and varied spatial patterning between residential houses, communal houses, and specialized houses. This paper provides a spatio-temporal analysis of communal and specialized houses on the Maʻohi...
Informe parcial del Proyecto Valle de Malpaso La Quemada Temporada 1992 (1993)
Field work from the 1992 season at La Quemada