Social inequality and turn-of-the-century farmsteads: Issues of class, status, ethnicity, and race (original) (raw)
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Archaeologists scramble up tall terraces, wade through cold water in irrigation canals, hop over stone walls, and diligently search farmers' fields for significant concentrations of potsherds that can be registered as a site. In their search for sites, however, most tend to ignore the landscape and what it can show us about agricultural intensification. Contemporary archaeology is firmly rooted in the site concept. Rural sites are said to date agriculture through proximity, and the density, duration, and distribution of settlements are considered indirect evidence of the degree of agricultural intensification. However, we pay only lip service to agricultural fields and boundaries, pathways , roads, and shrines—all seem to be secondary to the goal of finding sites in the form of settlements and monuments. Agricultural features might be described and sketched on the back of site survey forms, but they are rarely discussed in final publications. Despite the term's current popularity, landscape still equates with environment, as it is considered merely the context of a site for most archaeologists. If we are genuinely interested in issues of intensification and intensive agriculture , why do we ignore the most important landscape for directly addressing issues of prehistoric agriculture such as social organization, land tenure, labor organization, and rural lifeways? I would suggest that our perspective has been directed, and limited, by our own cultural background. Few of us grew up on farms or have colleagues that did. Although we are often surrounded by living farming traditions where we excavate and do settlement survey, we rarely pay attention to the farm life going on around us and ignore the relevant local historical and ethnographic literature. In this chapter I will discuss and address a number of explicit and not-so-explicit archaeological assumptions about IntensIfIcatIon, poLItIcaL economy, and tHe farmIng communIty in defenSe of a bottoM-up perSpectiVe of the paSt c l a r k l. e r i c k s o n
Rural modernization during the recent past: Farmstead archaeology in the Aiken Plateau
Historical Archaeology, 1999
Modernization theory is studied as a vehicle for interpreting archaeological resources of the recent past. During the period when many farmers were adopting mechanized equipment and new technologies for the home, the federal government purchased property from landowners in the Aiken Plateau of South Carolina to create a nuclear research facility. As a consequence, all farms in the study area were abandoned in 1951. This event created an opportunity for studying rurallifeways during a period when moderniz ation was restructuring agriculture in North America. Analysis of the built environment in the study area indicates that very few of the dwellings resembled the modernstyled homes that were emerging across the nation by 1950. Despite the paucity of evidence for modem farm dwellings, archaeological analyses indicate that most rural households were purchasing numerous commercially produced goods. Contrasting information thus illustrates the often uneven character of culture change and historical process.
The Appearance of Social Inequalities: Cases of Neolithic and Chalcolithic Societies
Origini, 2017
J. Müller/V. P. J. Arponen/R. Hofmann/R. Ohlrau, The Appearance of Social Inequalities: Cases of Neolithic and Chalcolithic Societies. Origini 38 2015-2, 2017, 65-86. By using a new methodological approach, which is based on the reconstruction of social roles of households by comparing architecture and inventories, the origin of social inequality is detected in a Neolithic village. In contrast the identification of manifold social identities in a Chalcolthic maega-site (including social inequalities) describes other forms of social control.