Households and Social Evolution: Comprehensive Approaches to Social Transformation

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Roth.

Changes in household organization were a major catalyst for social change in the Mimbres River Valley of southwestern New Mexico across the transition from pithouses to pueblos. This paper summarizes recent work at a large Pithouse period village, the Harris Site, and the Elk Ridge site, a large Classic period (AD 1000-1150) pueblo that is illuminating the relationship between households, community integration, and social change. Work at the Harris Site has documented the important role that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Spencer. Elsa Redmond.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nathan Goodale. Alissa Nauman.

The Slocan Narrows site is a prehistoric pithouse village aggregation on the Slocan River, a tributary of the Upper Columbia River in the interior Pacific Northwest, North America. 14C dating of housepit deposits have revealed a complex occupational history, likely reflecting fluctuating demographic and habitation cycles beginning ca. 3100 cal BP continuing to approximately contact in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Slocan Narrows was occupied through three millennia characterized by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Lee.

Household archaeology has made important contributions to the study of large-scale social transformations through the remains of the everyday. This paper examines the role of households, themselves, in the social changes that occurred during the Early and Middle Mumun Pottery Periods (ca. 1500-500 B.C.) in Korea. During this time, incipient social inequality developed alongside another significant change—households that were previously composed of multiple families became single-family units....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Julian Salazar.

Long term evolutionary narratives on South Andean pre-Columbian history have stressed lineal processes of complexity intensification, defined by big changes on subsistence strategies, from small and egalitarian hunter gatherer groups to complex multicommunitarian chiefdoms. These changes were thought to influence or even determine the structure of household and consequently daily life of people. Nevertheless recent household archaeology studies have demonstrated that the reproduction of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Pluckhahn. Neill Wallis.

The Middle Woodland period in the American Southeast was marked by a fluorescence of interaction, evidenced most prominently by Hopewellian exchange of exotic, symbolically-charged artifacts of stone, bone, shell, and minerals. The focus on exotic artifacts and their mortuary contexts has created a myopia toward exchange among elites, be they conceived as chiefs or religious specialists. However, recent work suggests that the exchange of exotics may have been secondary to more common exchange...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ian Kuijt.

The Near Eastern foraging to farming transition was characterized by the emergence of more powerful nuclear family and multi family households. It remains unclear, however, how this longer-term evolutionary transition was connected to small-scale daily household decision-making. Focusing on the archaeology sites of Tell Halula and Çatalhöyük, I explore archaeological evidence for the development of Neolithic multi-family households, and how they may have been connected to seasonal collective...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carl Wendt.

The Olmec are among Mesoamerica’s earliest civilizations and as such they provide a good opportunity to investigate household change in the context of developing social inequalities. Over the past few decades archaeologists have gathered household data that show the ways they transformed and remain unchanged during periods of social evolutionary change. Artifact assemblages and subsistence patterns are examined and together provide valuable insights ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lacey Carpenter.

Social evolutionary transformation involves and affects all levels of human society, including households. The formation of a state-level society at the Tilcajete sites has been documented through extensive horizontal excavations focused on the civic-ceremonial buildings at a two Formative Period sites in the southern branch of the Oaxaca Valley. This paper presents findings from 2 seasons of work in 2014 and 2016 focused on the residential sectors at El Mogote, occupied during the Early Monte...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Casey Barrier.

The development of large, complex settlements and the organization of associated institutions and social groups are major topics of research for anthropological archaeologists. The realization that pre-Columbian inhabitants of the central Mississippi Valley instigated complex social arrangements at urban scales makes Native North America a site of research that can contribute to the comparative study of urbanism. In this paper, previous and ongoing work near the site of Cahokia is discussed. A...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Glowacki.

Our understandings of how socio-complexity developed and the role households played in those developments are often hampered because we lack adequately fine-grained chronological data to identify when and how the relationships among households change. A detailed analysis of architecture and 260 tree-ring dates at Spruce Tree House cliff dwelling has produced a new reconstruction of how the village grew and changed over time at a decade-by-decade level. The village was occupied during the 1200s –...