House Society Models in Anthropological and Archaeological Theory: Chaco Canyon and the Prehispanic American Southwest.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In recent years, a growing number of archaeologists have explored the potential of expanding Lévi-Strauss’s concept of "house societies" to better understand local as well as regional development sequences. In this paper, I draw on the work of cultural anthropologists as well as archaeologists to create a revised theoretical framework for archaeological application. Taking a broad view of the extant theoretical and ethnographic literature on house societies, the primary goal of this paper is to identify how, cross-culturally, social inequalities are constituted in such societies. The manuscript proceeds in three stages: First, I discuss the history and evolution of house theory over the last 35 years and its development within archaeology; second, I present a revised definition of a house society model; and third, I use ethnographic and ethnohistoric data from Western Pueblo groups (specifically Zuni Pueblo and Hopi) to demonstrate the utility of resuscitating Indigenous house concepts to advance our understanding of Chaco Canyon and the Prehispanic American Southwest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Kin, Clan, and House: Social Relatedness in the Archaeology of North American Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24668