Big Roles for Smallholders in Complex Societies
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
Archaeology provides the unique opportunity to investigate historically silenced groups, such as the non-elite members of complex societies. With increasing emphasis on household assemblages in the past several decades, the artifactual remains of smallholders (or "peasants") make up a growing portion of archaeological data from early complex societies. It remains unclear, however, what types of roles smallholders played. Building on a spate of archaeological research into smallholders in the 1970s and 80s that provides the empirical background on how smallholders practice agriculture, the goal of this session is to tie their range of social practices, including participation in market economies, self-sufficiency, and household division of labor, to long-standing research questions related to the formation of complex societies. How did the role of smallholders vary between emergent complex societies in terms of the creation and maintenance of inequality? Did they facilitate, resist, and respond to large-scale social change in a uniform manner that we can use to generate a general theory of smallholders? This session addresses these questions from Old and New World perspectives. In seeking a broader theoretical framework for understanding smallholders, this session aims to generate unifying ideas of interest to anthropologist of both the ancient and modern world.
Other Keywords
Smallholders •
Household Archaeology •
Mesoamerica •
Agriculture •
Environment •
Bone Tools •
Economy •
Textiles •
Mobility •
Production
Geographic Keywords
West Asia •
South America •
Mesoamerica •
Europe •
Oceania
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)
- Documents (7)
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Introduction to Smallholders and Complex Society, with a Note on Pigs and Mesopotamia (2016)
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In this introduction, I discuss the literature on smallholders in complex societies and directions for current and future archaeological research. I attempt to answer several questions: What is a smallholder? How can we detect them in the archaeological record? How does a focus on smallholders contribute to studies of other social groups, such as classes, gender, and ethnicity? I conclude my presentation with a discussion of the role of smallholders in pig husbandry in Chalcolithic and Bronze...
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Producing an Empire: Household Production and Market Expansion at Postclassic and Colonial Xaltocan, Mexico (2016)
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Archaeologists have long been interested in household production and consumption, regional economic interactions, and the development and expansion of trade networks, particularly with the rise of states and empires. This research, however, has often focused on top-down political-economic processes in which state-level elite actors condition economic activity. Put simply, “states”—and by extension, their leaders—intensify household craft production, facilitate exchange, and redirect the flow of...
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A question of place: economies and intimacies in early Sweden’s smallest upland communities. (2016)
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Can we understand the connections between the state, farming economies, and the lived experience of smallholders in past societies? Using archaeological examples from the smallest smallholdings – crofts on marginal lands in northern Europe – the view of land as a rare, precious, and highly managed resource is examined. Despite the still-pervasive materialist notion that smallholders are passive mechanisms with shortsighted, self-defeating land management strategies, anthropologists have...
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The Relationships between Smallholders, their Textiles, and their Bone Tools: a Case Study at the Central Anatolian site of Kaman-Kalehӧyük (2016)
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Textiles are rarely found in Near Eastern archaeological contexts due to the rarity of suitable environmental conditions for their preservation. Cuneiform texts and limited artifactual evidence have therefore often been the main sources informing archaeologists of the technological processes involved in textile production. Yet, scanty data exist specifically on textile-manufacturing tools made from bone, a readily available raw material, and the smallholders who crafted these tools. This paper...
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Smallholders, Settlements, and the Reimagined State: How New Grammars of Modernity Impacted Land and Labor in the Late Ottoman Empire (2016)
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Archaeological studies of the modern world often focus on the effects of the “global” on the “local.” Understanding smallholder experiences in the modern period requires us to examine – to varying degrees – the economic and social consequences that global capitalism, colonialism and nationalism had on people at the local level, as well as how the construction of new grammars of modernity affected daily lived experiences. In this paper, I focus on the impacts of these new grammars on smallholders...
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Smallholders, Social Practices, and the Advent of Inequality: A Case Study from the Society Island Chiefdoms (East Polynesia) (2016)
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I discuss comparative analyses of Society Island residential complexes to understand the role of smallholders in the advent of social complexity. In particular, I investigate the role of commoner production and its relationship to the elaboration of social inequality in late prehistory. Integrated spatial analysis of activity areas, artifacts, and sub-surface features provides data for understanding variation in production and consumption activities (tool production, subsistence production,...
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Upward Mobility Among Smallholders of the Desert North Coast of Peru (2016)
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Mobility among smallholders or campesinos is a crucial element for understanding the development of both ancient and modern-day Peru. In the case of the ancient agricultural landscape of Mocán, the movement of people, products, and possibly plants, lead to increasing network complexity eventually culminating in the area’s incorporation into an important coastal polity. Archaeological evidence suggests changing approaches to landscape and water management over the 2,000 years of occupation in the...