Stop Seeing Like a State: Relational Complexity among Small-Scale Societies of Gulf Coastal Florida (Who Routinely Gathered in Large Numbers)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interventions of modern nation-states in the affairs of "underdeveloped" nations often fail for imposing standard categories on highly variable and historically situated local practices. The same might be said about scholarship on "complex" hunter-gatherers. Rather than oversimplifying by imposing order vis-à-vis state-level criteria (e.g., institutions of government, social stratification, religion, subsistence), archaeologists have the opportunity to investigate organizational variation beyond social categorization. Doing so requires a logic based in "relational complexity," a logic akin to heterarchy in its transient qualities and to a network in its multisited qualities. Beyond that, relational complexity invites consideration of nonhuman agents and nonlinear temporalities. In this regard, there are no complex hunter-gatherers as much as there are complex relationships of communities to other times, places, beings, and forces. To demonstrate such an approach, we look to a case study on the shores of the North Florida Gulf Coast, where large, temporary gatherings were structured synchronistically, involving the coordination of labor, specialized technologies, and the movements of persons, non-human agents, and celestial bodies within a ritually charged landscape. Rather than being a category or trait list, complexity was practiced by historically oriented, future minded, small-scale human societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Complex Fisher-Hunter-Gatherers of North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25207