The Archaeology of Property Regimes

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Under what conditions do property regimes come to be defined? What precipitates their emergence, transformation, or collapse? What kinds of property regimes facilitate sustainable resource management? Under which kinds is sustainability unachievable? Here we engage with a wide body of work on property regimes (including themes of land tenure, property rights, common pool resources, etc.) and leverage the archaeological record to facilitate a comparative perspective on, and to productively theorize, long-term histories of resource governance. Property regimes are arrangements that define rules, distribute rights, and delineate roles with respect to particular goods. These arrangements are often formalized through key institutions responsible for the management of resources, whether lineages, councils, communities, or more complex forms of government and bureaucracy. Variability in the management of resources can be measured across (1) the resources or goods being managed (e.g., abundance, distribution, labor requirements) and (2) the characteristics of key institutions through which rules, roles, and rights are determined. Through these two dimensions, property regimes can be formally assessed and compared. How open or closed are they? What are their degrees of flexibility, stringency, durability? Are they structured from the top down or bottom up? What are the ecological contexts? How are regimes enforced?

Other Keywords
Land Tenure • Historic • Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology • Political economy • Maya • Zooarchaeology • Survey • Urbanism • Pastoralism • Property

Geographic Keywords
North America (Continent) • United Mexican States (Country) • United States of America (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Belize (Country) • Republic of Guatemala (Country) • Isle of Man (Country) • USA (Country) • Mesoamerica • Colima (State / Territory)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Building Back Past Diné Communities: Ricos, Pobres, and Naat’aanii Status in Pericolonial New Mexico (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Campbell.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the mid-1900s, American anthropologists characterized Diné society as a four-tiered social organizational structure with “natural communities” at the highest level. Often referred to as regional “bands,” these geographically defined, economically self-sufficient, multifamily social entities were loosely organized under the nominal leadership of...

  • Climate Change, Disease, and the Collapse of Swahili Urbanism (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Chapurukha Kusimba.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Complex city-states arose on the East African Coast that were hubs of international trade networks. However, by the seventeenth century, most of these settlements had been abandoned. What were the causes of the Swahili state collapse? Historians and archaeologists have implicated climate change as one of the causal factors in the collapse of highly...

  • The Institutional Basis of Sustained Farming Systems (2024)
    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...

  • Property Regimes, Resource Protection, and Sustainability in the Remote Pacific (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Cramb.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The tradition of resource-use prohibition known as rahui is found throughout the Pacific Islands. Rahui typically involves placing certain resources or areas of the land and sea under the protection of a central authority. For rahui to exist the concept of collective resource exploitation must also exist. This appears antithetical to the traditional...

  • Salmon Wars: Medieval through Early Modern Land Tenure and Social Change in Northern Conflict Landscapes (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only T. L. Thurston.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Into the earlier, local common pool resource systems of Iron Age and early medieval Scandinavia, the increasingly incompatible taxation and land tenure concepts of developing state governments were imposed on Arctic and peri-Arctic populations. This paper examines the archaeological and historic record of conflicts, disputes, and uprisings that...

  • Scalar Responses to Production and Extreme Conditions in the Southern Borderlands of Aragon between AD 1248 and 1559 (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Cristina Allué Andrés. Theodore Gragson.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alfonso I took Daroca, an important city in the Upper March of Al-Andalus since the ninth century, by conquest in AD 1120. He granted the city a large rural territory that evolved by AD 1248 into a new property regime called the Comunidad de Aldeas de Daroca. Four such entities emerged in the southern borderlands of Aragon independent of the control...

  • Shellfishery Management and the Socioecology of Community-Based Sustainability (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Isabelle Holland-Lulewicz. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do human settlements grow sustainably? What is the capacity of both our institutions and our local ecologies to mediate the pressures of demographic growth? Nowhere are these questions and challenges more critical today than in coastal zones, where populations grow exponentially. For millennia, Indigenous populations across the globe have...

  • Whose Land? Governance of Land Tenure, Property, and Inequality in the Maya Lowlands (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Thompson. Adrian Chase.

    This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Property Regimes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The role that governance and property regimes play in the everyday life of citizens is something we grapple with, actively or passively, every day. In the archaeological record, these topics often prove challenging to evaluate without written records. However, using robust survey data from settlements and civic-ceremonial/administrative architecture...