Life Histories Thick and Thin: Scaling and Four Dimensions of Artifact Variability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Life history analysis offers a means for organizing activities through time that tracks the interactions of one or more objects. These objects both human and nonhuman make up the stuff of ongoing cultures and their archaeological remains. We record these lives using four types of measures: object frequencies, object associations, object locations, and objects’ physical properties (e.g., hardness, constituent elements, colors, lengths). A long-term challenge for behavioralism has been to work at more expansive scales than the behavioral interactions that form particular artifact life histories. How can we conceptualize addressing larger macro scale societal issues that implicate thousands of life histories? In this paper, I explore that challenge by unpacking cadenas, macroscale objects, conceived by behavioralists as units of analysis consisting of entire object histories rather than their particular parts (e.g., production behaviors, use behaviors, reuse behaviors, discard behaviors). How do we identify their interactions with other cadenas? How do we model their performance characteristics? How do we distinguish the life histories of composite physical objects such as kivas and pueblo buildings from cadenas? These are some of the questions I address using data from the late prehistoric villages of southern New Mexico and Northern Mexico.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23807