New world complex societies: Recent economic, social, and political studies

Abstract

Archaeologists working on the complex societies of Latin

New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization

“…One distressing trend is a continued conceptual sloppiness, first pointed out in Smith's earlier review article (Smith, 1993). To quote that paper, "some archaeologists claim to map and excavate 'households,' when in fact they study houses (artifacts) in order to infer households (behavior).…”

“…(e.g., Erickson, 1993;Kolata, 1996;Mathews, 1997;Stanish, 1994). Smith (1993 suggested that for raised field agriculture, "the jury is still out on its organizational requirements and political implications." Unfortunately, the research and debate on Tiwanaku (and other) raised field systems have still not settled the issue.…”

“…In a followup to this article (Smith and Schreiber, in press), we review research on political organization, religion, and urbanism. These articles are updates to "New World Complex Societies: Recent Economic, Social, and Political Studies" (Smith, 1993), and they cover publications between 1992 and 2003. We follow very generally the format of that article but include a number of areas of inquiry that have come to the fore in the most recent decade.…”

Heterogeneity, power, and political economy: Some current research issues in the archaeology of Old World complex societies

“…New World researchers have generally focused much more closely than their Old World counterparts on such topics as the scale and size of complex polities (Smith, 1993), household organization (Hirth, 1989;Webster and Gonlin, 1988;Wilk andAshmore, 1988), gender (e.g., Brumfiel, 1991;Costin, 1993;Joyce, 1992), and elite ideologies Clark and Blake, 1994;Costin and Earle, 1989;Hendon, 1991). AS in the New World, there has been tremendous progress in expanding the empirical database on specific Old World complex societies; however, there have been surprisingly few attempts by researchers in one area to apply models from other parts of the Old World (let alone constructs developed in Mesoamerican or South American research).…”

Taphonomy at two contiguous coastal rockshelters in Panama: Preliminary observations focusing on fishing and curing fish

“…Erlandson, 2001;Erlandson and Fitzpatrick, 2006;Moseley, 1975;Sandweiss et al, 1998;Yesner, 1980) have been palliated by the discovery that pre-Columbian peoples cultivated plants and developed agriculture far earlier than formerly believed often at very great distances from marine coasts (e.g., Piperno, 1988;Piperno and Pearsall, 1998;Smith, 1998;Smith, 2001). Even so, it is clear that some of the earliest manifestations of village life and complex societies in the New World developed in proximity to coastal wetlands and/or nutrient-enriched upwelling zones whose resources not only enhanced diet breadth and nutrition, but also injected valuable commodities into exchange networks, i.e., colorful marine shells, fish and marine mammal bones and teeth, sea salt, and cured fish and shrimp (Drennan, 1996;Smith, 1993).…”