Exploring the Question of Heterarchy vs Hierarchy at Urcuquí, Ecuador

Summary

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

Heterarchical and hierarchical power distributions in a society affect the distribution of labor within that society. In a heterarchical society, the labor is generally reciprocal community labor used to maintain a cooperative relationship despite distance between lived settlements (Scaffidi 2020), whereas hierarchical societies will have labor distributed in higher amounts to those with the least amount of power and vice versa (Crumley 1979). Urcuquí is a population located northeast of Ibarra, in the northern Highlands of Ecuador, occupied from 500 AD until 1500 AD and was commonly thought to be a part of the chiefdom of Otavalo (Salomon 1986). Labor was an important part of the sustainability of Urcuquí, and previous research has noted collective labor in the region in earlier time periods (Sharp 2020). Skeletal analysis of human remains for osteoarthritis, entheseal changes, linear enamel hypoplasia, and paleopathological lesions associated with infectious disease allow insight into past patterns of labor and demonstrate how labor was organized at Urcuqui. In this poster, we will present the patterns of activity and labor based on skeletal analyses of 33 burials from Urcuqui in order to investigate power distributions for this society. Photos of human remains.

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): 39678.0