Identifying Social Units and Social Interaction during the Pithouse Period in the Mimbres Region, Southwestern New Mexico
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
3-21-2019
Publication Title
Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest
Publisher
University Press of Colorado
Edition
1
First page number:
133
Last page number:
150
Abstract
Archaeologists have long battled with the issue of linking living, active social beings with the static remains they left behind. With the advent of household archaeology, ceramic sociology, and “actualistic studies” in the 1970s and 1980s, attempts were made to bridge the archaeological record, especially architecture and artifacts, with the people who lived in and used them (e.g., Longacre 1970; Wilk and Rathje 1982). In the decades since these landmark attempts, archaeologists have used a variety of new techniques and new theoretical approaches to develop these linkages (Bandy and Fox 2010; Douglass and Gonlin 2012; Varien and Potter 2008). The chapters in this section represent some of the most recent attempts to define, delineate, and understand various kinds of social groupings that were present at prehistoric sites and the role of social interaction in shaping them. The “social units” that these chapters address range from family groups to households to lineages to communities. In each case, the authors use a variety of tactics to reconstruct these social units and address the role that social interaction played in their development and maintenance.
Keywords
Household archaeology; Social interactions; Ceramic sociology; Pithouse period; Mimbres region; Kin groups
Disciplines
Anthropology | Archaeological Anthropology | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Language
English
Repository Citation
Roth, B. J.
(2019).
Identifying Social Units and Social Interaction during the Pithouse Period in the Mimbres Region, Southwestern New Mexico.
Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest
133-150.
University Press of Colorado.