Journal of Anthropological Archaeology最新文献

This study is an interdisciplinary approach to a veiled metaphoric design expressed in the present-day spatial layout of ecologically-derived patronyms of Mapuche lineages and families positioned in public ceremonial plazas. The perspective combines ethnoarchaeological, cognitive, iconographic, oral tradition, allegoric metaphor, and historical approaches to the organization and meaning of this design, taking into account the past and present dimensions of ritual media (e.g., political, ideological and sensorial) to render a concept publicly graspable. Shamans and other informants state that the design represents an ancient foundational schema established for intercommunity political solidarity during times of both peace and conflict in the Spanish colonial and Republican era of the south-central Andes of Chile. Shamans were asked to draw their mental image of the hidden design of the plaza to pictographically reveal its visual representation. By examining the iconography of patronyms depicting a loosely structured order of families hierarchically positioned in ceremonial space, the invisible nature of this pattern and its wider political and kinship meaning is considered. Viewed from an archaeological perspective, this schema is suggested to be associated with a “chiefdom” or intermediate, polity-level society, and may represent a type of mental imagery and template that served as a precursor to the visible iconography on wood, stone, adobe, ceramic, textile and other media of complex Pre-Colombian societies. Ultimately, this schema is a conceptual metaphor: mapping and structuring knowledge of a trophic hierarchy of elements in the natural world to evoke a political and public organizational principle through sensorial experiences and life concerns in the invisible and visible domains of an Andean-like ceremonial format.

Over the last century archaeologists have investigated late Neolithic and Bronze Age interaction networks spanning Eurasia, which in the east connected steppe pastoralists with farming communities in what is now northwestern China. While much attention has focused on the adoption and impact of technologies and domesticates from western Asia in eastern Asia, few models have been put forth to explain how these networks formed and functioned and why groups would want to participate in them in the first place. What research has been done on this topic has generally focused on analysis of ceramics and metal objects to suggest long-distance movement between broad geographic regions. Here I suggest that to understand long-distance interactions, we first need to understand the movements of people and goods at the site-specific level, which I theorize using the concept of translocality. I also question the idea that items being moved were primarily seen as commodities whose main purpose was for exchange. By rethinking the origins, function, and stability of networks on the microscale, I suggest that we can better understand participation in longer-distance interactions that eventually played a key role in the formation of state-level societies in eastern Asia.

Ritual plays an important integrative function in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human society. The shared experience of ritual establishes strong bonds between individuals that defines their membership in certain social groups. However, rituals are not timeless traditions, nor do they simply restore social equilibrium. Rather, rituals are active and ongoing social processes that unite and divide across multiple social categories. This paper applies archaeological network methods to analyze the multiscalar structure of ritual traditions across Classic Maya (ca. 300–900 CE) society using hieroglyphic inscriptions from dated and provenienced monuments cataloged in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991–2024). For the Classic Maya, public ritual and performance were highly charged political events where meaning and power could be negotiated, creating opportunities for identity formation and community integration. Such contexts helped establish strong moral bonds in Classic Maya society. However, we know relatively little about the specific forms and content of these ritual practices. In this study we construct ritual similarity networks from hieroglyphic inscriptions to analyze the structure and organization of these moral communities as well as the ritual relations that bound them together.

We compare motifs engraved on ostrich and rhea eggshell fragments from southern Africa and southern South America respectively. These elements were part of water flasks used, transported and cached by hunter-gatherers. We define trends in the motifs engraved on eggshells, inquire about their temporal and spatial distribution, their diversity and their information content in the context of the social interactions and boundaries developed among mobile peoples. A typology of basic motifs occurring on each side of the Atlantic was built to perform a three-step analysis. The first evaluates motif composition through three periods that we name ‘middle’, ‘initial late’ and ‘final late’ Holocene, the second examines image circulation within each period and the third assesses the information content of the engravings. Even though the ostrich and rhea eggshells’ visual repertoires are similar, motif variability and motif spatial distribution between the periods analyzed present differences related to the particular social processes that took place in each region. Ostrich eggshells’ higher information content could imply that interaction networks in southern Africa were more extensive than in southern South America. However, sample bias could also be affecting the results obtained.

Despite the importance of trees in the lives of hunter-gatherers, the economic, cultural, and spiritual roles of trees have been seldom explored empirically or theoretically. What research exists on the topic has mostly focused on economic aspects, especially firewood management, consumption of edible tree products, and tool manufacture. Here, we summarize data collected from 104 ethnographies on hunter-gatherers to analyze their relationships with trees. We focus principally on 14 societies from South America and two living in deserts in Australia and Africa, to achieve an environmental comparative perspective. We demonstrate that trees provided hunter-gatherers with multiple benefits that were not based on extraction, but also on conservation. Among these benefits are shade, temperature regulation, protection, recreation, using trees as parts of habitation structures, and soil fertilization. With these data we examine the roles that trees might have played as important constituents of places. We propose that it is possible to assess human-tree relationships at different geographic scales archaeologically. Moreover, based in the collected ethnographic data, archaeologists should consider past distribution of trees to understand hunter-gatherer settlement patterns, since trees appear to always have provided with immovable benefits, especially related to shelter.

For Indigenous people across the globe, being connected to traditional lands and histories continues to be of paramount importance. To document this connection on one river system in the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, we compiled archaeological evidence from 14 settlements occupied between 3,000 years ago and the early 20th century. We demonstrate how households and lineages persisted inter-generationally, expanded demographically and geographically over time, and forged diverse and nested social groupings and networks. We find compelling evidence for the emergence of a “settlement constellation” that formed through long-term processes of social fissioning. Our analysis moves between social, spatial, and temporal scales, tracking changing settlement patterns and demographic trends to the present day, emphasizing persistent occupational and social continuity between the Sts’ailes today and their ancestors. Extraordinarily long-lived house occupations and settlements are a feature of the Northwest Coast of North America, and may be a significant aspect of settlement constellations more generally.

The paper examines how materializations of human practices relate to human cognition and to socio-cultural contexts. By combining evidence on the relationship between material culture and perceptual behaviour, we aim to understand the interactions between the mind, objects, and the world. The research is based on data regarding the visual perception of prehistoric pottery that was analyzed using Eye-Tracking techniques in a way that has not been applied previously to archaeological material culture. The datasets come from Galicia (NW Iberian Peninsula) and range from the Middle Neolithic until the end of the Iron Age (6000–200 BP). They belong to very different contexts that comprise a long-term history through diverse socio-cultural formations. A rigorous methodology makes it possible to unveil cross- and intra-cultural patterns of visual response to materiality, while avoiding presentism and subjective bias. The results provide new insights into the agency of material culture, which contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the mind and the material world, and account for the transitive engagement between the way of thinking, seeing, and making things.

Merchant diasporas have significantly influenced local and interregional processes in world history, but archaeology is only starting to understand the diversity of political, economic, social and religious contexts within which they developed. Recent research has suggested that the second plague pandemic (Black Death) likely affected West Africa. However, little is known regarding the diversity of local and regional impacts and responses. We argue that documented population losses likely caused by plague resulted in disruptions to commercial networks and stimulated merchant diasporas from neighboring Mali into Burkina Faso and further south. Drawing on an expanded corpus of data and new stratigraphic and Bayesian analyses of AMS dates from the site of Kirikongo (western Burkina Faso), this paper identifies two waves of likely plague-related depopulation in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries AD and explores the resulting social, economic, religious and environmental transformations. Notably, local communities worked cooperatively with recently arrived Mande merchant diasporas from the Empire of Mali to reconstruct regional economies.

Social complexity in coastal and terrestrial environments both emerge as forms of subsistence intensification on previous foraging patterns but take different trajectories because of differences in the spatial and temporal structure and density of harvestable biomass between the two ecozones. Norms and values surrounding standards of living motivate households to intensify production above what is needed for mere survival (i.e., surplus), which in turn has the effect of providing a buffer against unpredictable shortfalls and longer-term population-resource imbalances caused by population growth. Economies of scale introduced by increasing labor group size and differentiation as well as technology fund the production and consumption of surplus and drive the emergence of social complexity among foragers and cultivators alike.

Carcass butchery is a culturally mediated behavior that reflects the technological, social, economic, and ecological factors that influence human diet and foodways. Butchery behavior can thus reveal a great deal about the lives of past peoples. Actualism provides a critical link between the dynamics of carcass butchery and the static remains of the archaeological record. This study provides an overview of actualistic butchery studies in zooarchaeology over the past century and a half. A systematic search through the English literature identified a total of 236 such studies published between 1860 and 2021. Thematic analysis revealed several trends. The most common themes have been the identification of signature criteria for different taphonomic effectors, the use of butchery traces to characterize the nature of human intervention with carcasses, and the documentation of butchery in an ethnoarchaeological context. Methodologically, the bulk of this research has focused on the butchery of large bovids with lithic implements, largely as a means to explore Paleolithic subsistence. Actualistic approaches will benefit from (1) additional work with non-bovid taxa and with other tool raw materials, (2) applications to broader anthropological issues, and (3) a concerted effort to replicate existing studies and design future studies with replication in mind.