Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World

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 "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Surveillance—the act and apparatus of observation—is a key fixture in the behaviors and materials of human societies. While narratives of power, authority, domination, and resistance feature prominently in the literature, surveillance remains undertheorized in archaeology. This relative lack of attention is perhaps because articulations of surveillance in other contexts, such as Bentham’s panopticon and Foucault’s essays on power and knowledge, were explicitly modern in their conception and application. Nevertheless, the social significance of watching and being watched is also apparent in the archaeological record of many premodern societies, especially states and empires. This session presents case studies on the archaeology of surveillance from a variety of disciplinary and societal contexts. In particular, it aims to examine the materiality and landscapes of surveillance. What are the material culture correlates for watching and, equally important, for the watched? Where and when do human groups invest in the architecture of surveillance and what effects can be detected or inferred from such investments? Where are material vestiges of surveillance conspicuous in their absence? By examining the conditions of surveillance (forced labor, borderlands, colonialism, imperialism, bureaucracy) in a number of global contexts, we also demonstrate how archaeology can contribute to broader dialogues in surveillance studies.

Other Keywords
Colonialism • Historic • Iron Age • Digital Archaeology: GIS • Survey • Power Relations and Inequality • Social and Political Organization: States and Empires • Warfare • Violence • Ethnohistory/History

Geographic Keywords
Republic of Turkey (Country) • Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Country) • State of Israel (Country) • Lebanese Republic (Country) • Syrian Arab Republic (Country) • West Bank (Country) • Republic of Cyprus (Country) • Gaza Strip (Country) • Italian Republic (Country) • Hellenic Republic (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • Make a List, Check It Twice: Bureaucratic Surveillance in the Early Chinese Empires (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Robinson.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, governed their lands and peoples using an army of bureaucrats who were responsible for, among other things, creating a vast quantity of administrative documents. Of particular interest to the state was the population—the governments kept population registries, updated...

  • The Materiality of Surveillance: Scale, Complexity, and Polity (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Knodell.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Textual and archaeological evidence make clear that most ancient polities were concerned with surveillance in some way. However, the scale of material investment in surveillance suggests different motivations in different contexts. This paper compares the material signatures of surveillance in Greek Bronze Age...

  • Mining Datasets and Weaving Diverse Contexts: A Multisite Comparison of Indigenous Forced-Labor Compounds in Colonial Peru (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Kennedy. Maria Smith. Di Hu.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Spanish Empire drew on multiple forms of forced Indigenous labor in their American colonies during the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. In the Andes, forced Indigenous labor was used to mine silver, craft textiles, grow sugar cane, and produce wine, among many other tasks critical to the colonial economy. Crucial...

  • A Mutual Gaze: Watching and Being Watched in the Unsettled Sociopolitical Landscape of Early Twentieth-Century Southwestern Tanzania (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydia Wilson Marshall. Thomas Biginagwa.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long considered surveillance as a tool of control—for example, over enslaved or colonized peoples. But what of cases where the gaze goes both ways? The first two decades of the twentieth century were marked by seismic sociopolitical upheavals in what is now southwestern Tanzania: German colonialism...

  • Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Indigenous Responses to Roman Colonial Surveillance in Alentejo, Portugal (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Joey Williams. Rui Mataloto. Karilyn Sheldon.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. If visibility is undertheorized in archaeology, then invisibility is doubly so. This paper investigates the avoidance of surveillance in a colonial context. The central Alentejo, Portugal, was, in the first century BCE, home to watchtowers established under the new Roman administration of the region. In this remote...

  • Serving the State under Surveillance: Material Correlates of the Watched on an Inka Royal Estate (Cusco, Peru) (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kylie Quave.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Inka royal estate installation of Cheqoq (Maras, Cusco) reveal domestic spaces likely inhabited by both the watched (the retainers to the nobility) and the watchers (the intermediate elites overseeing laborers). Typical interpretations of the presence/absence of...

  • Surveillance and Intelligence Gathering in the Urartian and Assyrian Empires (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Earley-Spadoni.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), two distinct fortified landscape styles had developed in western Asia: fortifications surrounding grand urban complexes and the "fortified regional network" (FRN), a rural, regional system comprising fortresses, forts, towers, and other structures situated along roads and...

  • Surveillance at Ancient Hillforts of the Titicaca Basin, Southern Peru: Insights into Social Dynamics and Defensive Strategies (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Smith. Elizabeth Arkush.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we model visibility and movement in and around ancient hillforts or pukaras across the highlands of southern Peru. During the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE), communities moved to hilltops where houses were often tightly packed together within the confines of large defensive walls. The...

  • Technologies of Surveillance, Technologies of Care? Colonial Census, Biopolitics, and Networks of Surveillance in Southern Guatemala (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Pezzarossi. Paige Emerson.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Technologies of surveillance are a common element of diverse forms of extractive early modern colonial projects as a method of effectively extracting value from humans/non-humans. The forms surveillance takes vary widely, frequently blurring into technologies of “care” for laboring bodies to ensure their continued...

  • Territorial and Border Surveillance in the Greek World (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sylvian Fachard.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Greek world formed a giant mosaic of city-states and leagues stretching over the entire Mediterranean and delimited by political borders. Like today, crossing a border was not innocuous, as states imposed their rule of law and enforced strict surveillance over their territories. This paper examines archaeological...

  • Under the All-Seeing Eye: The Archaeology of Native Californian Resistance at Mission Santa Clara (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Panich. Monica Arellano.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The façade of Mission Santa Clara de Asís features the All-Seeing Eye of God, a symbol that serves as a reminder of the omnipotence of the Christian God. This symbolism reinforces ample archival evidence that the Franciscan missions of Alta California—like Spanish missions elsewhere in the Americas—were strictly...

  • “The Watchers Belonging to the Warriors”: Military Surveillance among the Maya (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Garrison. Fernando Véliz Corado. Stephen Houston.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ethnohistoric accounts from highland Guatemala allude to surveillance systems and their personnel forming part of the integrated defense of Maya political territories during the Late Postclassic period, prior to the Spanish arrival in 1524. Recent lidar-driven archaeological research in the Maya Lowlands suggests that...

  • Watching Me, Watching You, Watching Me: Greek Helots and Their Masters (2024)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Alcock.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient classical sources tell us that in the late eighth/seventh centuries BCE the armies of Sparta marched on their neighbors to the west, the Messenians, and conquered their wide and fertile lands. Many Messenians fled, but others remained to become the famed “helots” of the Greek world—a population subject to...