The Effects of Households and Labor Requirements on Intracommunity Boundary Formation, Settlement Choices, and Neighborhood Functions in Modern and Prehistoric Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cooperation is essential to labor networks in low-density agricultural societies. Household or neighborhood heads must learn to identify, select, and monitor raw materials, and estimate harvest times and transport costs. In addition, kin related groups must nurture allegiances to attract and reciprocate for labor to build houses, farm, and for other communal duties. In this paper we explore how households and other collective groups maintain intracommunity boundaries by drawing on four data sets: Geospatial distributions of households and multihousehold labor-sharing clusters from Santa Cruz (SC), a modern, Maya speaking community; full-year ethnographic time allocation data relating to labor activities and networks in SC; energy calculations on costs, derived from GPS-tracks associated with the management of forest products in SC; geospatial and archaeological studies of ancient households, neighborhoods, districts, and natural resources near the Classic Maya center Uxbenka. We develop analogies between modern and prehistoric communities to illustrate mechanisms for forming and maintaining boundaries. We expect that observed modern and inferred ancient labor networks would be distributed similarly across the landscape, with positive spatial correlations relative to access to water, farmland, transportation routes, minerals, plants and animals.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24693