Rethinking Egalitarianism and Segmentarity from Archaeological Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For a researcher raised on a political-economy archaeological tradition, the assertion that the origin of inequality is not the relevant point in anthropological research is a shake. But after a careful reading of *The Dawn of Everything*, we are still persuaded that social relations of production remain the heart of the matter. The aim of this communication is twofold. We will present an overview of Spanish social theory on archaeology to show to what extent it is coherent with the book’s proposals. Clastres’s ideas and peasant societies are both at the core of many Iberian Peninsula archaeological researches. We will also describe the archaeology of Iron Age northwestern Iberia in order to foster the discussion of egalitarianism as an historical construction, and not as an “state of nature” or primitive fiction. Two issues are especially relevant for us: the assertive agency against hierarchization and the existence of egalitarianism in complex agrarian social formations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In Defense of Everything! Constructive Engagements with Graeber and Wengrow’s Provocative Contribution   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39140.0