Rising Up Against Authority: Archaeological Approaches to Rebellion

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Rising Up Against Authority: Archaeological Approaches to Rebellion" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rebellions, either against external powers or internal authorities, represent a recurring phenomenon from antiquity to the present. Famous examples include, among others, the ancient slave revolt led by Spartacus, the Batavian rebellion against the Roman Empire, the Pueblo Revolt against Spanish colonial authorities, or the American Revolution against the British. While archaeology has a long tradition of studying rebellions in their various manifestations, particularly in contexts with written sources, it has only been relatively recently that more explicitly theoretical approaches to the topic have been developed. In this session, we aim to bring together papers that approach the materiality of rebellions in multiple ways: from broader theoretical and methodological reflections to an analysis of specific case studies, and from violent uprisings to more veiled strategies of resistance. The session has a markedly comparative spirit, thus we welcome presentations from any time period and region across the globe. The aim is to rethink the ways in which archaeologists can contribute to the study of a theme that continues to be as topical as ever in our current world.