How Unusual Is the Trajectory of Precolumbian Social Change in San Ramón, Costa Rica among the Trajectories of Chiefdom Development? A Comparison Exercise

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent literature on comparative archaeology has pointed out the need for systematic comparisons of trajectories of social change that use primary quantitative data and standardized variables. This type of comparison has the potential to discover and explore the diversity and complexity in the processes of social evolution, beyond the sole use of holistic typological categories. The emergence of chiefdoms is a topic, among others, that can be explored more in-depth by using the strategy just described. A first look at the precolumbian trajectory of social change in San Ramón, Costa Rica, shows that this region had both what appear to be typical features in other trajectories of chiefdom developments, as well as highly atypical elements. This first impression needs to be evaluated by a systematic comparison of the San Ramón trajectory with what has been usually taken by the archaeologists as typical trajectories of chiefdom emergence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37972.0