Political Complexity and Gendered Violence in the Andes – A Bayesian Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The nature of violence in the pre-modern past remains an enduring question in anthropological research. In this study, we investigate the potential relationship between sociopolitical organization and the frequency and type of violence experienced by adult males and females in Andean archaeological contexts. For this study we establish four broad categories of sociopolitical organization: foragers, early agriculturalists, ‘soft’ hegemony, and states. Drawing on a database of over 6700 individuals from over 115 sources and 130 sites, we then construct a multinomial logistic regression using Bayesian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods to fit our model. Our findings indicate that odds of encountering antemortem or perimortem trauma were low for both sexes, but consistently slightly higher for males than females across all categories. However, there are clear differences in the odds of trauma among the four societal categories. Additionally, societies with soft hegemonic influence show higher odds of trauma and atypically similar odds of perimortem trauma for the sexes, suggesting differences in the nature of violent encounters in these societal categories. Our study complicates the notion that increasing sociopolitical complexity leads to decreasing interpersonal violence and highlights the different ways that males and females in the Andes were likely to experience interpersonal violence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37930.0