Journal of Anthropological Archaeology最新文献

Present theory suggests that neighborhoods form through frequent, repeated face-to-face interactions among people in groups of spatially co-located residences. Over time, layered interactions create relational identities (through face-to-face contact) and categorical identities (through perceived similarities). Neighborhood identity, when present, indicates a union of both relational and categorical identities generated through shared social experiences. Unfortunately, we cannot directly ask the deceased about their neighbors; however, we can reconstruct likely zones of frequent, repeated face-to-face interaction and then test those assumptions using archaeological data. This analysis reconstructs neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize through the application of least cost analysis and k-means clustering. This spatial reconstruction relies on interpretations of interactions occurring near residences, in adjacent terraced agricultural fields, at public plazas in districts, and on the way to and from service-providing district architecture. Reconstructed neighborhoods, based on relational identity, are then tested archaeologically with excavated material from contexts related to categorical identity. Inter- and intra-neighborhood comparisons of ritual deposits from cache and burial deposits within 59 excavated residential plazuela housemound groups situated among eight sampled neighborhoods test and validate these reconstructed neighborhoods at Caracol, Belize by demonstrating, with statistical significance, more similarities within than between reconstructed neighborhoods.

Together with the development of ancestral Huron-Wendat village life in what is now southern Ontario, Canada, unusual deposits consisting of animal parts, small stones, and manufactured items such as smoking pipes were occasionally sequestered in sweat lodges, longhouse post holes, and other features. In instances where such deposits have received comment, most turn on notions of ritual behavior that betray commitments to a modernist distinction between sacred and profane acts. Such deposits, it is thought, align with the former category and can be reduced to their veiled symbolic meanings. In this paper, we seek to reframe this understanding by drawing upon Indigenous scholarship, particularly the Huron-Wendat philosophy and theology of Georges Sioui, along with the early documentary record and archaeological evidence. We argue that such deposits are better understood as the material vestiges of gatherings — concerted efforts to reveal latent yet ever-powerful beings or forces by bringing together seemingly disparate things and siting them in important places. Recast as products of an immanent rather than transcendent ontology, Huron-Wendat gatherings work against traditional notions of ritual as applied in archaeological settings. The late fourteenth through mid-fifteenth century ancestral Huron-Wendat village known as Grandview provides the case study for exploring these ideas.

Change in Holocene Australia is typically depicted as establishing greater control over the environment, with heightened prosperity, growth of social complexity, status competition, intergroup congregation, and population. Endogenous social processes altered Australian forager life yielding, on average, increased per capita output. Those claims were named Intensification. We critique that concept, re-evaluate evidence, and conclude there is no evidence for release from environmental constraint or heightened prosperity.

Our model is more capable of explaining change in Holocene Australia. This Red Queen model claims cultural changes reflect unfavourable alterations in economic opportunity, driven by coevolution with dingos during worsening environmental conditions. Restructured environments with fewer high ranked foods led to greater diet breadth, expansion into marginal landscapes, and focus on atypical resource rich spots. By increasing their labour groups sought to maintain population size, this strategy reducing the likelihood of neighbouring groups seizing resource hot spots. Foragers responded to tensions with neighbours over resource access by magnifying social defence, offering limited use of resources in return for maintenance of territorial control. Those political negotiations constructed moderately stable alliances. We test the Red Queen model and show it, not Intensification, explains the emergence of ethnographically identified social interactions, economy and settlement systems.

Social hierarchy is the most prominent framework scholars use to examine settlement structure and development in Southeast Asia's pre- and post-state eras. The concept of social heterarchy, an unfixed ranked and diversified form of social structure, is an alternative approach to examining the sociopolitical organization of early settlements in the region. However, applications of heterarchy are limited in archaeological research on the sociopolitical organization and social landscape in Southeast Asian state societies. This paper incorporates space syntax and GIS angular and viewshed analyses to understand how sociopolitical interactions were arranged through the spatial configurations of the historical Buddhist temples in Chiang Saen, Thailand. This paper explores the complex interactions between various historical Chiang Saen social and religious groups through their temple spaces across time. Temple spatial characteristics indicate heterarchical forms of organization—evidenced by the hybrid and nonhierarchical temple spatial patterns characterized by open accessibility and integrated and symmetrical organization of spaces—co-existed with hierarchical relationships from the 13th to 17th century. The approach discussed here provides a better understanding of the multiscale relationships and interactions among sociopolitical groups in the historical communities in Chiang Saen, enabling a broader view that can embrace the co-occurrence of hierarchical and heterarchical forms of governance.

We present analyses of post-fire engravings (PFEs), scratched markings made in the surface of ceramic vessels, from the sites of Atalla (800–500 BCE) and Huari (600–1000 CE), Peru. We compare engraved motifs, the vessel forms on which they appear, their placement on vessels, and the contexts in which they were found at Atalla and Huari to other examples mentioned in the Andean and international archaeological literature. These comparisons elucidate both regional and site-level spatial patterns that suggest that these markings constitute intentional visual notations created by the vessel users. Drawing upon the Quechua concept of quillca as “the creation of meaningful markings,” we argue that Andean PFEs are meaning-laden signs whose use was comparable to writing. Our analyses also reveal that PFEs appear most frequently on serving wares, such as bowls and cups, vessel forms that were used in commensal events. Semasiographic writing is particularly useful in multilingual contexts, and we highlight that the archaeological data support a correlation between the use of PFEs and historical moments of increasing intercultural interaction in the pre-Hispanic Andes. We present a case for this alternative form of literacy and suggest that this form of semasiographic writing played a role in multilingual commensal events.

Studies that employ probability distributions of radiocarbon dates to study past population size often use exponential increase in radiocarbon dates with time as a standard of comparison for detecting population fluctuations. We show that in the case of early postglacial interior Scandinavia, however, the summed probability distribution of radiocarbon dates has best fit with a S-shaped logistic growth curve. Despite the logistic growth model having solid grounding in ecological theory, we further argue that what our data indicate is not logistic growth in the population ecological sense but “false logistic” growth that mainly follows from climatic and environmental forcing. In the initial postglacial phase, 9500–7500 BCE, human settlement was located almost exclusively along the Scandinavian Atlantic coast and the use of the mountainous interior remained low. Thereafter the formation of separate inland adaptations resulted in population growth in tandem with increasing climatic warming and environmental productivity. Some millennia later, when environmental productivity started to decrease after the Holocene Thermal Maximum, hunter-gatherer population size in interior Scandinavia reached a plateau that lasted at least 2000 years. Lowering productivity prevented any population growth that would be detectable in the available archaeological record.

Our study explores pre-contact taro cultivation in pondfield irrigation systems on Rurutu (Austral Islands, French Polynesia). Understanding the size and extent of these systems is critical for estimating pre-contact human population, the ability to produce surplus, and socio-political dynamics. Since peak taro cultivation occurred across Polynesia prior to its historic documentation, the extent of wetland cultivation must be estimated from other sources. We explore pre-contact ecology and population levels on Rurutu using Landsat imagery and geospatial suitability analysis to estimate the maximum extent of the island’s pondfield irrigation systems. A primary goal was to develop an intra-island comparison of probable annual yields of taro to model pre-contact population sizes and their distribution at the system and socio-political district scales. Our model indicates the likely presence of 20 dormant taro systems on Rurutu. Our results point to significant intra-island differences of taro production on the island in the pre-contact era. We suggest that Rurutu’s Open socio-political structure was maintained, in part, by unequally dispersed arable taro land throughout the island which contributed to intra-island differences in annual yields and population densities resulting in endemic pre-contact warfare. We end by linking our data to ongoing conversations regarding resilience in Oceania and beyond.

Studies of Inka quarry operations have focused on large-scale quarries in the Inka imperial heartland, with emphasis on finishing techniques and geochemical sourcing. To assess diachronic variation in the technological organization of late pre-Hispanic building stone extraction, we compare survey data from the Chuquibamba District (Arequipa Region) – an Inka provincial context – and the Sacred Valley, a vital part of the Inka imperial heartland. Our sample (n = 41) includes small- and large-scale quarries that supplied material for Inka state and elite projects as well as local vernacular construction during the Late Intermediate Period and Late Horizon (ca. 1000–1532 CE). To chronologically contextualize quarry sites, we assess use periods based on scale, diagnostic technology, and building stone provenance. We deploy a multilinear approach using archaeological data, colonial chronicles and dictionaries, and analogies to ethnographic and modern cases to analyze the knowledge, decision-making process, and mechanics that facilitated material extraction. The results demonstrate that Inka building stone quarrying techniques developed out of widely shared vernacular knowledge and practice. This study articulates a new approach to late pre-Hispanic Andean architecture while providing a case study to evaluate the relationship between political organization and technological systems.

The archaeology of how communities in the North American midcontinent responded to environmental change has had global significance for understanding hydroclimate-human relationships in non-industrialized societies. We evaluate how an agriculturalist settlement network, the Angel polity, coped with environmental change through comparing the radiocarbon-derived occupation history to local proxies for hydroclimatic change from Martin Lake, Indiana. Located within the northeast Mississippian (AD 1000–1500) frontier, the Angel polity consisted of a network of hamlets and villages, encompassing ∼800 km² in southwest Indiana with the Angel Mounds site serving as the polity’s social nexus. The results indicate that Angel Mounds was established as the Medieval Climate Anomaly transitioned to Little Ice Age (LIA) drought with the construction of a community centered around a platform mound earthwork. The Angel polity’s population became more centralized at Angel Mounds during the initial decades of the LIA drought conditions and a large fortification was constructed at Angel Mounds during this time. The dissolution of the Angel polity occurred in AD 1350–1450 during a profound LIA-associated mega-drought and regional depopulation of the midcontinent. These results provide an example of how non-industrialized, agriculturalist communities responded to episodes of hydroclimatic change.

Costly signaling theory indicates that highly visible acts of public generosity and display, which exact costs not easily recouped, can provide social benefits to those engaged in such acts. Such signaling is associated with the strength or fitness of the provider. Costly signaling has been implicated by archaeologists in the rise of complex societies. But costly signaling theory, with modifications proposed in the article, might equally apply to theorizing political collapse and the regeneration of complex societies thereafter. This article explores how Maya elites and rural sub-elites engaged in costly signaling and modified their actions by cost shifting and cost masking, which significantly transformed their signaling behavior. The material culture media assessed for signaling are architecture, slipped and fineware ceramics, and obsidian in display contexts. The case study focuses on the Petén Lakes region of Guatemala from the Late Classic to Early Postclassic periods (AD 600-AD 1250).