How Can Behavioral Ecology and the Analysis of Archaeological Spatial Structure Help Identify Inequality among Enslaved Households at Monticello?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For decades archaeologists have used optimization models to puzzle out how artifacts served the fitness interests of their makers and users. This paper offers a simple optimization model to clarify how selective pressures (e.g. household size and occupation span) shape the maintenance of space on domestic sites and archaeological spatial structure. It outlines an R-based workflow for the analysis of one aspect of spatial structure, artifact size sorting, including measurement and visualization of variation in size sorting within and among sites. The workflow facilitates the measurement of variation in size sorting among households occupied by enslaved agricultural laborers at Monticello Plantation (Virginia, USA). The model highlights selective pressures that might be responsible for this variation, and facilities the construction of alternative explanations and the search for independent evidence that can used to evaluate them. The result is the identification of unanticipated inequality among households, driven by variation in the probability their members could count on residence at the site from one year to the next.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Practical Approaches to Identifying Evolutionary Processes in the Archaeological Record   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25841