Collaborative Research: The Emergence Of Social Inequality

University Of Miami, Coral Gables FL

Investigators

Abstract

How and why social inequality emerges and becomes institutionalized within human societies represent some of the most fundamental issues facing the social sciences. The ramifications of these choices and changes reverberate through modern human societies and have tangible impacts on the lives of modern people. Archaeology is uniquely well suited to examine these issues and to tease out the process(es) by which egalitarian human groups made their first steps towards distributing power and resource access unequally among the members of a given society. It is in this broad vein that the present work will examine the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 500-1000) societies of the San Pedro de Atacama oases (northern Chile), a time and a place in which institutionalized social inequality was just beginning to emerge from a long-standing foundation of egalitarianism. To reconstruct the complex aspects of social inequality, the researchers will focus on detailed analyses of a vast sample of human burials and skeletal remains, revealing both how emerging inequality affected the lives of different individuals in these societies and proposing why these drastic social changes were being made. In the process, undergraduate and graduate students from the investigators' institutions, and in particular Latin American and Hispanic students, will be encouraged to participate and thereby gain invaluable training in archaeological and bio-anthropological research methods. While archaeologists have examined the processes driving the emergence of social inequality, most studies have viewed the phenomenon of its emergence on the level of whole societies rather than evaluating its effects on the lived experience of individuals and communities. It is in this context that the present work will provide invaluable data: this project will focus on the skeletal remains of various individuals and the manner of their burial for evidence of how and why inequality manifested in each of their lives. To do so, this project will explore the effects of the emergence of differences in social status as it is crystallized in individual experience through a combined research methodology that includes: 1) the study of skeletal remains for evidence of diet, bodily stress, disease, activity patterns, and violence; 2) the evidence of social inequality as expressed by how, and with what each individual was buried; 3) an expansive program of carbon dating that will allow for detailed reconstruction of cemetery use; and 4) a focused analysis of diet through biochemical analysis (stable isotopes). This methodology in combination with the unique archaeological record of the Atacama oases will permit the researchers to address chicken-and-egg debates about whether specific physical manifestations of unequal treatment (dietary difference, greater rates of bodily injury) preceded or postdated other manifestations of burgeoning inequality (e.g. the appearance of exotic goods, the building of elite houses, etc.). Such findings will contribute to a much broader discussion about the profoundly unequal distribution of wealth in contemporary societies and its impact on individual lives, by adding historical depth to our understanding of these processes.