Do Not Be Distracted by the Talking Dog: Aspirational Status Display by Medieval Elites at San Giuliano (Lazio Province, Italy)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Chip Stanish once told me that a good archaeologist should be able to be thrown out of a plane anywhere in the world and find something interesting to say about the material record there. Inspired by many years under Chip’s tutelage and drawing on my earlier work in the Andes, I here present data from my current research at the tenth–thirteenth-century medieval Italian castle of San Giuliano. I discuss a range of empirical evidence that although San Giuliano was built originally by a lord of one of the territorial principalities emerging in the medieval period, it was then occupied by lesser nobles or officials who aspired to display prestige but did not possess the material wealth necessary to obtain goods of the finest quality. While there are clues that the inhabitants of La Rocca aspired to display greater wealth than they perhaps possessed, they were nonetheless linked to the material indicators of status and participated in broad trade networks that connected them to other nobles throughout Italy. This work is enriched both theoretically and methodologically by Chip’s contributions to archaeological inquiry into the construction of wealth and status in past societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36851.0