Household dynamics and the reproduction of early village societies in Northwest Argentina (200BC-AD 350).

Summary

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 quotidian practices within specific material settings were creative scenarios where the whole society was created, reproduced or challenged.

In this contribution I present new researches on early villager settlements from the eastern slopes of the South Andes addressing the material dynamics of houses and the constitution of collectives which allowed the formation of early villages. Rather than being determined by mandatory structural or subsistence forces, society was continually created and reproduced within the material mesh of daily life and household relationships. On the other hand, these performative creations were not multiple free willing actions but defined by the long history of other precedent material meshes. This dialectic dynamics shaped early villages at multiple scales.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Households and Social Evolution: Comprehensive Approaches to Social Transformation

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15672