The Labor of Building a Community: Exploring the Divergent Trajectories of Complex Sites in Copper Age Iberia (original) (raw)
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2021
This contribution addresses a problem of periodisation: the transition between the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age in south Portugal in the late 3rd millennium BC. This transition corresponds to a breakdown in a path of social complexification developed since the middle of the 4th millennium BC. Four main endogenous systemic variables were selected to discuss their explanatory potential in addressing this breakdown: large scale interaction, investment in monumental forms of ideological display, social emulation, and historical acceleration. The inflated development of these variables is considered to have generated imbalances within the system (namely with the productive subsystem and with social bonds), responsible for the development of systemic fragilities that, by the last quarter of the 3rd millennium BC, would make this social trajectory more vulnerable to eventual external factors, which would act mainly as accelerators of the outcome.
The Matter of Prehistory: Papers in Honor of Antonio Gilman Guillén, 2020
Traditional studies of prehistoric inequality have focused on its material traces in the archaeological record, examining evidence such as architecture, patterns of long-distance exchange, craft specialization, settlement hierarchies, and mortuary treatment. Bioarchaeological data from human skeletons provide a unique and complementary line of evidence with which to augment existing archaeo- logical approaches, as embodied inequalities in the lived experience of diet, mobility, trauma, disease, physiological stress, and activity patterns can lead to differences that are osteologically measurable. Bioarchaeological investigations of inequality are particularly important for the Iberian Copper Age (circa 3250–2200 BC), a period marked by significant social transformations, including the emergence of complex sites. This chapter focuses on the available osteological evidence for patterning in diet, mobility, and violence at complex Chalcolithic sites such as La Pijotilla, Los Millares, Marro- quíes, Perdigões, Valencina-Castilleja, and Zambujal to explore the biocultural impact of Copper Age social transformations. The chapter concludes with recommendations for continuing to develop a regional bioarchaeology of the Iberian Copper Age while embedding bioarchaeological data within the larger context of archaeological investigations of inequality within Iberian late prehistory.
Perspectives on Health: Working with Communities as Cultural Anthropologists and Bioarchaeologists
Engaged Scholar Journal, 2020
The anthropological study of health has always been an integral part of the discipline. With the development of cultural anthropology and physical anthropology (specifically, bioarchaeology) in the nineteenth century came different theories and methodologies concerning the study and definition of communities. Still today, cultural anthropology and bioarchaeology share the same broad goals of exploring the evolving relationships between experiences of health and the community, culture, and environment (being natural, domestic, political, and social). That cultural anthropologists study extant cultures and bioarchaeologists do not has necessitated the evolution of different methodological practices. Here, I explore some of the differences between these two subdisciplines: their differing notions of community, how they engage with communities, and the relevance of their work to the communities they study. I contextualize this analysis with a short discussion of the sub-disciplines' co-evolution and ground it with examples from my research with middle Holocene Siberian, Russian Federation, and Anglo-Saxon to Post-Industrial British communities.
2003
Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from 65 localities as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal a long-term decline in health in pre-Columbian America, a trend driven by population movements into less healthy ecological environments. The approach can shed light prime movers of long-run economic growth, human adaptation to climate change, and the effects of geographic conditions on social performance. 1 When and why industrial countries became rich and healthy are important questions in economics that form the ...
This chapter discusses some of the most recent studies that have been conducted among the indigenous Xavante people in Central Brazil by members of the research group Health, Epidemiology and Anthropology of Indigenous Peoples, coordinated by Ricardo Ventura Santos and Carlos E. A. Coimbra Jr., from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro. Members of this research group first studied the Xavante in 1990 and have since published on such diverse topics such as nutrition, subsistence, demography, epidemiology of infectious and parasitic diseases, and social organization. Recently, the group has focused on the relationship between health profiles and emergent forms of socioeconomic differentiation internal to specific Xavante communities. Additionally, they have begun publishing the results of longitudinal studies that document phenomena that had not yet been evident in cross-sectional approaches. In this chapter, they illustrate these new directions with examples of recent research on dental health, demography, and nutrition transition. These examples demonstrate the interrelatedness of health and various ecological, political, economic, and sociocultural transformations of different temporal scales.
2003
Lack of evidence has been the major obstacle to understanding trends and differences in human welfare over the millennia. This paper explains and applies methods that are obscure to most academics and essentially unknown to the general public. A millennial perspective is best obtained from skeletal remains, which depict not only childhood health conditions but also processes of degeneration that accompany aging and strenuous physical effort. Compiled into an index of health, data from 65 localities as part of a large collaborative project on the Western Hemisphere reveal a long-term decline in health in pre-Columbian America, a trend driven by population movements into less healthy ecological environments. The approach can shed light prime movers of long-run economic growth, human adaptation to climate change, and the effects of geographic conditions on social performance.
"Debating early social stratification and the state in Prehistoric Iberia: An introduction."
Cruz Berrocal, M.; García Sanjuán, L. & Gilman, A. (Eds.): The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratification and the State, 3-10. , 2013
This book originated in the session "The Prehistory of Iberia (Neolithic to Iron Age) and the Debate on the Formation of Hierarchical Societies and the State" organized by two of us (María Cruz Berrocal and Antonio Gilman) and held at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology conference in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada) in March 2008. When we envisioned the publication of the session papers, the scope and the number of contributions was enlarged, and the book became the present The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratifi cation and the State .