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129 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
Economy
A society's means of satisfying wants and needs
Are economic relations socially embedded?
Yes
Production
Intentional actions that incorporate objects into human social life
What process transforms "raw materials" into objects of value that also may imbue objects with symbolic value and social potential?
Production
What determines a commodities value?
- Determined by wants and needs
- Often exchanged with other "objects of values"
What is an example of a practical need?
Nutritional, Utilitarian, etc.
What is are examples of culturally defined "wants"
- pigs in traditional Melanesian society
- cattle for Maasi of East Africa
- automobiles for North Americans
What are the social benefits of having objects of value?
Signal status/prestige
How are raw materials obtained socially?
1. By coordinated tasks at the the household level and/or
2. By reciprocal exchange, tribute, taxes, etc.
What are some examples (ancient and modern) of divisions of labor?
- potting guilds
- plantation slavery
- production in factories
Specialization equals...
... interdependence mediated by social interactions
Is work a social practice?
yes
What are the social reasons to work?
- support household members
- accumulate wealth for household
- enhance or maintain indiv. or family status
- forced labor = power relations
Determining who does what work in a society involves...
identity, status, and power
Examples:
- Navajo weavers are women
- Mesoamerican potters are born into a potter family
Exchange
- most societies are defined by degrees of specialized production
- exchange moves products through society
- establishes, mediates, negotiates social relationships
What are the types of exchange?
Reciprocity, Redistribution, Market
What are some examples of how exchange establishes, mediates, and negotiates social relationships?
- marriages, status change (age, rank)
- non-residential group memberships
- guild production or trading partnerships
Reciprocity
creates relationships of mutual obligation and dependency
Balanced reciprocity
Partners give/receive roughly equally and simultaneously
(ex. Christmas gift)
Generalized reciprocity
- partners reciprocate at different times than they receive- but expect to be reciprocated
ex. taking a friend out for coffee
Redistribution
Surplus is gathered in by a person, corporate group, or government
- distributed according to need
- used to fund projects, buy loyalty, etc.
What are examples of redistribution?
- Aztec granaries- rations given to people in times of need/on ritual occasions

- progressive income taxes fund government services

- government surplus food stores
Markets
- common locales for exchange
- extra-political: organized without political intervention
- politically-embedded: protected, policed markets, tax supported
Barter
goods-for-goods
- household to household or larger scale
Currency
Goods exchanged for widely used marker of value

e.g. Chumash shell beads
How do archaeologist identify if something had Utilitarian Value?
- Animal or plant remains used for everyday subsistence
- large scale production and storage = commodification of subsistence goods
How do archaeologists identify Symbolic value?
- Measures of relative rarity or labor costs
- Specific foods used in elaborate feasts
- Material items restricted to certain social classes
Evidence for Specialized production
1. Substantial material evidence of production
2. Distinct items in different households
Social Contexts of Production
1. Households: commoner, elite, etc. vs.
2. Workshops: non-domestic space vs.
3. Royal courts: client artisans, members of nobility, etc.
Workmanship
Techniques Used
What is standardization an indicator of?
Mass production
Hascherkeller, Germany
Early Iron Age farmstead site in Bavaria
- large enclosure ditches
- pits across site
Peter Wells identified specialized metalurgic production
- hammerstones
- casting waste
- molds
- loom weights = weaving?
Production beyond the level of household needs = workshops?
Colono Ware in the Chesapeake and Caribbean
Pottery produced by African slaves in SE and Caribbean

Virginia and South Carolina
- Deetz/Leland Ferguson
- Diversity in form, technique, morphology
- Household production?

Caribbean
- Mark Hauser
- Standardization in types, techniques, morphology
- Workshop production?
Conclusions of Judith's Research
- Potters in Central Rio Grande used Cerrillos ore exclusively, even if other ore was available
- Lead ore circulating in different contexts and at broader regional scale than whole pots
- Reflects diverse, cross-cutting and overlapping social networks
"Household" or "Domestic Group"
People who live together, often work together
Residential Groups in "The Hearth"
- Maya extended households (close kind)
- Teotihuacán compounds (not all kin)
- Roman familia (servants, slaves)
Non Residential Social Groups
- Do not live together
- Can be organized by a range of pirinciples
What are the main range of principles that non-residential social groups can be organized by?
- Political affiliation
- Religious affiliation
- Kin-based, but not coresidential
- Ritual/Social Functions
Community
Social Relationships at residential AND non-residential level
Do sites overlap with community perfectly?
No, individuals of same site can have more than one community, sections of one site can be divided into many communities, and "site" may not cover all types of social relationships.
Social Status
Rights, duties, privileges, powers, liabilities, and immunities of individual people
What are some factors of social status?
- Age, gender
- Kinship
- Birth into class or locality
- Education, Achievement, etc.
Achieved Status
Assigned based on person's owned accomplishments
(eg knighthood)
Ascribed Status
assigned by membership in a group that passes on status only to their members
eg. princes
What is the make up of Egalitarian Societies in terms of social organization (ie hunter gatherers vs state)?
mobile hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, some farming people
Can people achieve status in egalitarian societies?
Yes
- fine hunter, gatherer, mother, many herds
- brave warrior
- ritual knowledge, etc.
Ranked Societies
- Status is ascribed by birth or adoption
- Elite family lineages distinct from commoners (few, directly inherited)
- "Upward mobility" sometimes possible
Class Societies
- Status ascribed by birth
- Marry within group, relatively numerous
- Upwards mobility possible
Markers of Status
- Irreversible body modifications
- Bodily decoration
- Sumptuary regulations
- Controlling exotic, rare, costly objects
Studying Social Relations Archaeologically

What do you need to identify in the archaeological record to study social relations?
2. Identify Social/Domestic space (Architecture: Walls and Features: hearths)
3. Identify Consumption Patterns ("artifact function: tasks, production roles" and distributions: activity areas)
4. Identify Individuals (Burials: diet, health, genetics, social status markers)
What is important to note about funerary objects/tombs and burial/social status?
- Constructed by living
- Signify Status of Dead
How is status marked in burials?
Dress, ornament, funeral furnishings, grave construction, sacrifices, and offerings
If a young child is buried with lavish grave goods and high-status objects, is this society's social status ascribed or achieved?
Ascribed (they're too young to have achieved their status in life)

ex. King Tut
Moundville, Alabama
- 13th to 15th Century AD
- 20 large platform mounds
- mounds served as burials and temple platforms

Christopher Peebles:
- some goods common, some limited to particular people

Identification of specific status groups based on prevalence of prestige good?
If I was buried with coper, axes, earspools, gorgets, beart teeth, stone discs, galena, etc in Moundville, Alabama, what is my status level?
Highest Status
If I am buried with ceramic bottles, bowls, or no goods, in Moundville, Alabama, what is my status level?
Lowest status
Basic Steps in Finding Households
1. Define domestic space (walls, hearth, domestic debris)
2. Mobile groups harder to ID than settled, but look for (hearths, primary vs secondary refuse analysis)
Primary Refuse
Where people cooked, ate, worked
Secondary Refuse (middens, dumps)
- Spacial relation to houses, hearths
- Samples longer span, wider range of activities
Site (Inter Household) Level Analysis
Comparison of Households across sites can inform on social identity, status, etc.
(consumption patterns, labor to make buildings, etc)
Intra-Household Level Analysis
Comparison of features within households can reveal social relations within residential groups

Example: Forbidden City, Beijing
- collectively signifies elite status
- Interior complexed reveal diverse social status (cooks, slaves, empereror, noble, etc)
Virginian Plantation Communities
- Material landscape of status inequality
For example,
- Architectural difference (main house vs slave quarters)
- Material Culture differences (imported vs locally made utilitarian products, luxury wares and goods in main house)
- Material patterns correspond to power and social dynamics
Virginia Plantation Households
- For most of 17th century, Masters and slaves lived together
- Architecturally marked by a pattern (simple houses with accretionary growth as plantations expanded)
Virginia Plantation: From Households to Community
1. Social Tensions emerged in late 17th century (Rise of slavery, economic crisis, popular revolt)
2. Servants/slaves moved out of main house into "quarters"

Social tension = actual change in architecture and community structure
Androcentrism
Practice, wether conscious or not, of emphasizing men usually to the exclusion of women
Public/Private Dichotomy
Man = Public/Active
Female = Private/Passive
Man-the-Hunter Model
Uses ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogy to define gendered division of labor; men's activities seen as prime movers of cultural and biological evolution
Princess of Vix
Iron Age Burial, East France 500-480 BC: originally identified as a transvestite priest due to mix of "male" and "female" grave goods
Identity
1. Sense of belonging: individuals' identification with broader groups on the basis of difference socially sanctioned as significant
2. Focus on one aspect of identity to the exclusion of others; partly an intellectual bias and partly an issue with data
Intersectionality
complex interaction between a range of discourses, institutions, identities, and forms of exploitation that structures subjectivities (and the relations between them) in elaborate, heterogeneous, and often contradictory ways
Ideology
- Culturally specific ideas about the way the world is and why.
- Structures how individuals are perceived based on how they act
- Makes "natural" a set of human relations with other humans, plants, animals, the world
Religion
- Subset of Ideology
- Aims to understand/mediate relationship of humans with supernatural
- Often involves ritual practice, but not all rituals are religious
Ritual
- Stereotyped behavior aimed at producing certain internal states in participant
- Expresses fundamental ideological tenets

Types:
Calendrical (Easter)
Transitional (Communion)
PROCESSUAL view of Ideology
1. Culture is system,ideology is product of subsistence adaptations and social relations
2. Ideology/religion are "adaptive"
3. Cultural meanings of ideology CAN'T be inferred from archaeological evidence
POST PROCESSUAL/ CRITICAL/ FEMINIST view of Ideology
1. Ideology pervades all human thought/action
2. Even subsistence & technological activities are performed in ideological context (ie "women's work" vs "man's work")
- Ideology often masks, makes "natural" the existing social inequalities
- Social relationships and ideology supporting them may NOT be equally beneficial to all members of society
Architecture and Ideology
1. Material expression of ideas (more sedentary the society = more architecture)
2. Public architecture = sites for critical or calendrical ritual activities
3. Archaeastronomical architecture: made for calendrical ritual (stonehenge)
Iconography
Expresses central symbols
(eg Paleolithic cave art)
Mortuary symbols and ideology
Mortuary practices = ritual behavior (repeated patterns reflect ritualized actions)
Context and Archaeological Ideology
Relation among different evidence reveal symbolic associations
Art
- set of material practices/performances
- evokes feeling & responses
- not separable from worldview, politics, economy
- part of social life
- way of making meaning
- must be understood in local/historic contexts
How old is Paleolithic Cave Art?
32,000 to 10,000 BP
When was Paleolithic Cave Art discovered?
late 19th century
Where is Paleolithic cave art concentrated and how many have been found?
Concentrated in north Spain and South France. Over 300 found
What are the most famous cave art sites?
Altimira Cave, Spain; Lascaux and Grott Chauvete, France
Portable Art
Figurines, personal ornaments, engraved plaques
How did Abbé Henri Breuil (1940s and 1950s) interpret Upper Paleolithic Cave Art?
- Functionalist approach
- Caves were sacred sites/sanctuaries
- Painting were part of rituals performed to increase hunting success ("sympathetic magic")
How did Andre Leroi-Gourhan (1965) interpret Upper Paleolithic Cave Art?
- Paintings part of elaborate system of meaning with specific structure or "grammar"
- Based on division of world into male/female
How did Margaret Conkey (1980s+) interpret Upper Paleolithic Cave Art?
- Contextual approach
- Art as social practice (abstract, ambiguous) constructs meaning through production and use in specific social contexts
- Must be understood in broader context of Upper Paleolithic lifeways
What were the Upper Paleolithic lifeways?
Upper Paleolithic characterized by social life of materiality, mobility, and creation of meaning in cultural landscape
According to Conkey, Upper Paleolithic Cave Art..
... is way of creating knowledge/meaning in material world
... makes personal experience public
.... transmits social info
... aesthetically/symbolically charged representation of real world
Status
Collection of rights/duties that accrue to a recognized/named social position
Is status associated with different amounts of power based on social identities?
Yes. Factors include age, gender, kinship, ability, occupation, residence, alliances, etc.
What are the two types of status?
Achieved vs ascribed
Power
Potential to influence or initiate social action
Types of power
Constructive, cooperative: "power to"

Exploitative/coercive: "power over"

resisting/circumventing: "power NOT to"
Sources of Power
Economic
Ideological
Political
Military/Coercive
Are sources of power mutually reinforcing?
Yes
Politics
How a society organizes itself to make decisions, resolve conflicts, control distribution of social status and power
Political Organization of Small Scale Societies
political structures are informal/situational
Political Organization of Large Scale Societies
political power in formal institutions of government, coded in law, and backed by coercive force
"Egalitarian" Societies Structure
1. Scale- up to 2 dozen, rarely more than 100
2. Social org- ties of kinship (marriage or inherited)
3. Political organization- no formal leaders, no economic difference between members of society
4. Economic Organization: simple farmers/hunter-gatherers
5. Religious Organization: shamanic, ad hoc rituals
Band
Single family lineage
Tribes
groups of lineages united by clan ideology
What is the scale of a chiefdom?
5,000 to 20,000
What is the social organization of a chiefdom?
- Kinship based
- Ranked society
What is the political organization of a chiefdom?
- hereditary leader
- legitimate authority (people accept chief's rule)
What is the economic organization of a chiefdom?
- intensified production/agriculture
- centralized accumulation/redistribution
Is there centralized redistribution/accumulation in a chiefdom?
Yes
What is the religious organization of a chiefdom?
- chief does ritual duties
- rituals emphasize link between Gods and Ancestors
Is a chiefdom a complex society?
Yes
Is a band a complex society?
No
Is a state a complex society?
Yes
is a tribe a complex society?
No
What are the two types of egalitarian societies? Are they complex or simple?
Simple
- Bands
- Tribes
What is the scale of an Early State?
More than 20,000
What is the social organization of an early state?
Class stratified society (by job title, position)
ie nobles versus priests vs craft specialists
What is the political organization of an early state?
- King or Emperor
- Monopoly of coercive power
- Centralized bureaucracy
What is the economic organization of an early state?
- State institutions/Markets redistribute goods
- Tribute/Tax based (king owns territory)
What is the religious organization of an early state?
- Priestly class
- State religion
Managerial Theory of "Why Complex Societies Arise"
- Leaders emerge to manage social demands
- Leaders serve integrative functions
Coercive theories of "Why Complex Societies Arise"
- Leaders are out for their own self interests
- Propertied class makes decisions
How can archaeologists Identify social complexity?
1. Scale of social integrations
2. Evidence for social inequality
Western European Neolithic
1. Minimal status difference in burials
2. Settlement in long houses = lineages

= "tribal society"
The Megaliths
- Scandinavia, Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, West Med, Corsica, Malta
- Appear between 4,500 and 4,000 BC (Early Neolithic)
- Dolmen and Barrows
- Mostly smal structures (5-10,000 worker hours = 20 workers for 50 days)
- Often contain multiple burials
Why Build Megaliths?
- Territorial control?
- "Houses of the Dead" making symbolic statements about ancestral places
- Communal burial customs reflect lineage (social organization)
Barrow --> Henge --> Stone Henge
Increasing complex political system, took to organize these structures. Increasing focus on individual graves.
Chieftain of Stonehenge
In 2001, 2 miles from Stonehenge a burial was found. Very rich. 2400-2200 BC (stge 3)

Items found: exotic flint projectiles, copper daggers, gold earring, archer's wristguard, central european pots
What were the four burial groups of Moundvile?
Group A: Chief's Lineage
Group B: Nobles
Group C: Commoners
Group D: Non-persons
What is a "non-person"
Person with no status in Moundville society (slaves, war captives)
- retainer sacrifices
- serve as status marker for chiefs