Social Archaeology Research Articles

Archaeology in Macedonia and Thrace: Iron Age to Hellenistic, 2014–2019

This paper reviews archaeological publications and fieldwork related to Macedonia and Thrace of the past five years, covering the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period, with reference also to sites and projects in Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Turkey. Published syntheses reveal the priorities that have driven archaeological research to date (for example funerary monuments, ties to historical figures and narratives, pottery) and a need for more studies on other aspects of social history and archaeology, such as subsistence, crafts and households. Fieldwork at settlements has continued over the years, but few are being dug and published to current standards. A discussion is growing about the role and use of the countryside, and field surveys and excavations are providing new data on this. Fortified rural sites in Greece and Bulgaria may indicate that similar social processes were afoot, but full publication and the retrieval of relevant comparative data, especially faunal and botanical, are essential for a better understanding of potential differences.

Toward a Social Archaeology of Food for Hunters and Gatherers in Marginal Environments: a Case Study from the Eastern Subarctic of North America

The archaeology of hunters and gatherers has long focused on the economic and technological dimensions of food use and procurement. In marginal environments especially, hunter-gatherer food use has often been situated within an adaptationist calculus of survival and environmental accommodation. The ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers that inhabited such environments, however, indicate that social and cultural considerations also critically informed indigenous peoples’ procurement, consumption, and discard practices. Drawing on the later prehistoric and early historic archaeological record of the island of Newfoundland, in northeastern Canada, this paper explores how the procurement, consumption, and handling of subarctic foods conveyed identity, reflected historical conditions and social relations, factored into ritual and ceremonial practice, and embodied worldviews.

Peanuts and Power in the Andes: The Social Archaeology of Plant Remains from the Virú Valley, Peru

We present new data highlighting the symbolic and ritual association of peanuts (Arachishypogaea) on the north coast of Peru during the Early Intermediate Period (200 BC to AD 800). Recent paleoethnobotanical work at the two Viru polity sites of Huaca Gallinazo and Huaca Santa Clara has revealed a distinctive distribution of peanut remains in contexts associated with elite and ceremonial practice, including performative feasting and burial ritual. In contrast, peanuts were rarely recovered from domestic spaces associated with quotidian practice. Furthermore, unlike staple crops such as maize (Zea mays) or beans (Phaseolus spp.), their low frequencies in state-run storage facilities suggest peanuts did not have a significant role in the polity-wide redistribution economy. Information drawn from historical documents and archaeological excavation beyond the Viru Valley likewise suggests differential consumption of peanuts, which were largely linked to ritual practice across the greater Andean region.

The place to be: Community archaeology as a tool for cultural integration

ABSTRACTThis article presents two case studies in which public archaeology was used to attempt to shift local perspectives on migration and migrants. The two archaeology projects, which took place in the United States and Sweden, emphasized participants’ connections to places and shared experiences in the past rather than to ethnic groups in an attempt to combat the use of heritage and archaeological interpretations as a mechanism for xenophobia. Here we discuss our experiences with this form of social justice-oriented public archaeology, including identifying methods, observations, and approaches that can be adapted for other contexts, and explore the possibilities for archaeology to be used to address pressing and widespread concerns in society today.

Jhaya and Bariya: A Case in the Early BrÁhmÍ Inscriptions of Sri Lanka

Jhaya and bariya are two terms in early BrÁhmÍ inscriptions in Sri Lanka that had been used to denote the next of kin of privileged persons. Its prestigious usage suggests that the duality was not a hasty expression. Present variation does not correspond to any geographical or linguistic anomaly notably the differences held in the syntactic morphology of the contemporary language. In the perspective of social semiotics, it could be argued that the regular occurrence of this inconsistency may signify a sensible disparity corresponding to the contemporary social fabric. Theory of social semiotics considered as the ‘codes’ of language and communication are formed by social processes shaped by relations of power. Therefore giving a meaning is a social practice. This essay attempts to investigate the probable social circumstances which resulted in this duality of lexicon in the early BrÁhmÍ inscriptions in Sri Lanka.Key words: social semiotics, historical linguistics, social archaeology

From Moments to Histories: A Social Archaeology of the Mesolithic?

This contribution will provide a critical overview of the other papers within this special issue of Journal of World Prehistory (Elliott and Little 2018), identifying key aspects of the discussion and assessing potentials and problems in the development of Mesolithic archaeology in Britain and Ireland as a whole since 2006 (Conneller and Warren in Mesolithic Britain and Ireland: New approaches, Stroud, Tempus, 2006a). Reflections will include how the contribution of very high-resolution analyses to Mesolithic archaeology has changed since 2006 and the scale of our interpretations. The review will also identify areas which appear to be falling from analytical focus, including the role of analogies in Mesolithic archaeology and the nature of power and social relationships in Mesolithic communities.

10 Might Community be the Key to Unlocking the Social Potential of Bioarchaeology?

ABSTRACTFrom the perspective of social archaeology, it seems bioarchaeology has been slow to recognize its social‐interpretive potential. However, I think that “community” might be the key to unlocking this potential. As an interested outsider, I try here to explain the motivations and priorities of social‐interpretive archaeologies, and to place the papers in this volume within the broader network of anthropological and archaeological theory. I also comment on the issues of boundaries and boundedness, scale, metaphor, and memory, all of which, one might argue, are social topics that have remained just beyond the reach of “traditional” bioarchaeology.

Kinship and Social Archaeology

Kinship is a most significant organizing principle of human grouping, the basic matter of social categories in archaeological and ethnographic societies, and an important concept universally. However, its significance has rarely been adequately incorporated within archaeology’s theoretical and interpretative practice. This article aims to not only show the potential of bringing kinship into social archaeology, but also argue that archaeology can make important contributions to wider social research. Grounded on prehistoric data, spanning from the 8th to the 4th millennium bc, and drawing on cross-cultural discussions, it explores how understandings and practices of kinship might have been constructed and enacted in the first farming communities through architecture, time, material products, burials, and rituals. In doing so, the article addresses key issues of common interest in archaeology and anthropology, inviting interdisciplinary dialogue.

For a Social Archaeology at the Droulers/Tsiionhiakwatha and Mailhot-Curran Sites

St. Lawrence Iroquoian social archaeology is at the center of our investigation and households will be discussed in this paper using domestic pottery and spatial analysis of cultural remains from two village sites of the Saint-Anicet area. The villages of Droulers and Mailhot-Curran will be used for this study. Droulers is a late 15th century village, which is actually the biggest known Iroquoian village in Quebec with an estimated size of 1.3 ha. This settlement was probably occupied by at least 500 souls distributed over a dozen multifamily dwellings. Mailhot-Curran is a smaller 16th century village with six longhouses distributed over 0.6 ha with an estimated population of 200 persons. Selected households allow us to study social relations between its members and their clan affiliation.

Interacting with Heritage: Social Inclusion and Archaeology in Barcelona

In this article we will analyse a community festival in which the Public Archaeology and Heritage Group (GAPP, Grup d'Arqueologia Pública i Patrimoni) participated. As GAPP members, we helped to organize a street parade for this festival (the 4th Rua Xic, in 2014) which ended at the Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya (MAC, or Museum of Archaeology of Catalonia) where a short play with an historical theme was performed. Based on this participatory experience, we aim to ponder the limits and possibilities of heritage in triggering critical thinking, even when archaeologists take a secondary role. We discovered that even when people access the past in an uninformed way, with ‘heritage’ in an ancillary role, it can help resolve social tensions and positively reinforce community identity.

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

Grave Matters: Mediating Corporeal Objects and Subjects through Mortuary Practices

St Thomas’s Head and the Archaeology of the Mundane

ABSTRACTSt Thomas’s Head on the North Somerset coast was a relatively minor military installation particularly used during the Cold War for trialling explosive weapons technology in the Bristol Channel. The development and longevity of its life as a military site was a direct result of two special landscape qualities (physical seclusion and an exceptionally high tidal range), but in contrast the site’s physical fabric consists of the most ordinary, mundane and ephemeral structures and signage. Although recent years have witnessed similarly modern remains being reassessed as heritage, particularly those of industrial and Cold War sites, traditional notions regarding the appreciation of ruins remain a hindrance to their appreciation. The ordinariness of the human landscape on St Thomas’s Head, especially in contrast to its natural qualities, stands as a barrier to understanding it as a product and a reflection of the Cold War and as the working environment of its community of former employees who are commemorated only in the site’s ephemeral, ‘unlovely’ architecture. This article examines how ‘ordinary’ physical remains can be vital for understanding and experiencing a place, in terms of landscape, conflict archaeology and social archaeology.

New World Paleoethnobotany in the New Millennium (2000–2013)

This article evaluates the current state of paleoethnobotany since Hastorf’s 1999 review published in this journal. We discuss advances in methods, ancient subsistence reconstructions, the origins and intensification of agriculture, and how plants inform on issues of political economy and identity. Significant methodological developments in the extraction, identification, and analysis of starch grains and phytoliths have led to advancements in our knowledge of early plant domestication and the transition to food production. Paleoethnobotanists increasingly are using more complex quantitative techniques to characterize their data, which have resulted in more nuanced interpretations of plants that fall within the purview of social archaeology and allow us to address issues related to gender, identity, and ritual practice.

Swarm Intelligence as a Prosthetic Capacity

Swarm intelligence is the production of generative social space, the agency to “create and open spaces into which existing knowledge can extend, interrelate, coexist, and where new ideas and relationships can emerge prosthetically.” Swarm intelligence is argued to be a liminal, proximal, and distal zone of collective human development wherein memories and experience are made “prosthetic” in both the verb and noun sense of the word—that is, as an adaptive and potentially pedagogical capacity enabling the assimilation of supplemental patterns of behavior and thought, as well as the accommodation of the extant social archaeologies and emerging architectures that might further constitute our identities.

Bridging Social Anthropology and Industrial Archaeology at a Georgia Grist Mill

The Eelbeck Mill Complex and Community is a complicated archaeological site with numerous industrial and domestic features from the 1820s to the 1940s. Excavations, historic research, and oral history proved to be substantial and complimentary sources of information for discovering and understanding the industrial features at Eelbeck and as well as their roles in social relationships within the community. Using theory from science, technology, and society (STS) studies, actor-network theory (ANT), and the concept of vernacular engineering, this case study illustrates the interconnectedness of industry and daily life and argues that industrial sites cannot be explicitly separated from domestic sites in archaeological analyses of technical-social systems.

Book review: Stella Souvatzi and Athena Hadji (eds.) Space and Time in Mediterranean Prehistory (Routledge Studies in Archaeology)

The collection of papers Space and Time in Medi- terranean Prehistory is an outcome of the collabo- ration between Stella Souvatzi, who regularly writes on spatiality within social archaeological themes such as households, as in her recent book A Social Archaeology of Households in Neolithic Greece, and Athena Hadji, whose Berkeley PhD thesis was entitled on The Construction of Time in Aegean Archaeology. The editors invited researchers from a predominantly interpretative (post-processual) ar- chaeological tradition who deal with Mediterranean prehistory and included a few selected revised contributions to the similarly named session at the 16th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in the Hague. The collection of papers contains 15 chapters by archaeologists, anthropologists and an architect.

Fetisjering i arkeologiske forklaringer

Fetishism in archaeological explanations. This paperengages in the age-long debate on subject/object-relationsin Archaeology: Do we study things as materials and objectsin themselves, or things as remnants after past subjects andsocieties? It is argued, from a theory of science-perspective,that Archaeology is particularly prone to fetishize objectsin explanations, due to its extraordinary hermeneuticalposition, which have resulted in a downgrading ofarchaeology’s ontological ambitions. Fetishism is heredefined as "a displacement of meaning" (Dant 1996:498-499), which is deemed as unwanted in the scientific community.In a virtue-ethical way, a norm of responsibility is presentedto counteract the specific forms of fetishism that tend tooccur in archaeological explanations. The virtue states thatresponsibility obtains in an archaeological explanation, andthus makes it "good", by subscribing to the right object,the right amount of causal responsibility. By comparingSymmetrical and Social Archaeology to Phenomenology, itis argued that all fail to comply with this norm by fetishizingeither the object or subject of inquiry. Most spectacularlyfails Symmetrical Archaeology, and in general moreintuition-based Phenomenology.

Agency, practice, and chronological context: A Bayesian approach to household chronologies

This article proposes a methodological change within social archaeologies of household agency and practice, specifically a move to prioritize the development of precise household chronologies. Chronological precision can allow scholars to historicize household practice and remain anchored in social, political, and economic context, and thus, chronology is a vital part of archaeological studies of agency at the microscale. Given the field’s recent focus on detailed stratigraphic excavations, microstratigraphy, and the reconstruction of genealogies of practice, I suggest that the easiest way to improve chronological precision is Bayesian statistical modeling of a large number of stratified radiocarbon determinations from household contexts. I illustrate the value of such an approach through the case study of the Structure 122 household at Xaltocan, Mexico. I create a precise chronology using Bayesian statistical modeling of 14 AMS radiocarbon dates from stratified deposits, which allows me to not only determine the precise timing of individual deposits, but also to interrogate previous findings of ethnic shift with broader political-economic changes. This sample, while small, hints that chronological imprecision may have led to the incorrect attribution of transformations in practice to elite, imperial actors, and demonstrates how Bayesian household chronologies may help archaeologists better identify agential practices.

The Bioarchaeology of Postmortem Agency: Integrating Archaeological Theory with Human Skeletal Remains

Taking the social agency of dead bodies as its main theme, this introduction discusses the articles in this special section on the bioarchaeology of post-mortem agency and discusses theoretical concerns relevant to the (bio)archaeological analysis of agency. In particular, the argument that only biological living persons have social agency or impact the direction of social processes, or the decisions of others is challenged. The challenges of defining and archaeologically detecting such agency of past humans as well as socially alive entities such as ghosts, corpses, relics and totem heads are discussed. A review of the ways investigations of the agency of the dead might unify bioarchaeologists and further integrate social archaeology into future research is also presented. It is argued that a holistic anthropological approach to humans and their ability to impact their surroundings is not complete if the symbolic and material effects of the dead are not considered.

Beyond the Ecofact: Toward a Social Paleoethnobotany in Mesoamerica

This essay examines the relationship between social archaeology and paleoethnobotany in Mesoamerica, a region where paleoethnobotanical research has been growing rapidly. We synthesize Mesoamerican paleoethnobotanical studies that have gone beyond descriptions of subsistence economies, reconstructions of ecological systems, or static lists of identified plant remains. These paleoethnobotanical investigations, we argue, transcend the ecofact to shed light on how human–plant interaction was connected to power, agency, societal structures, and normative constraints—fundamental foci of research in social archaeology. Pulling on current trends in Mesoamerican paleoethnobotany, we show how these social archaeological topics have been addressed via studies of political ecology and ritual. Future advances in social paleoethnobotany are contingent upon methodological innovations in data sampling, quantification, analysis, and integration. We end with a consideration of additional pathways toward a social paleoethnobotany, which includes contributions to understanding materiality, past gender relations, environmental knowledge, and the effect of scale on analysis and interpretations.