Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Household Practice And The Emergence Of Social Inequality

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

The emergence of social inequality, here defined as unequal access to material and social resources within a society, is one of the most intriguing issues for social scientists as it implies the existence of hierarchical power structures and the emergence of complex society. As the basic social unit, household is a particularly apt arena for studying economic difference and for reconstructing the nature and degree of social inequality in early societies. Under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Arkush, doctoral candidate Peiyu Chen, of the University of Pittsburgh, will excavate the site of Huaca Negra on the Peruvian northern coast and undertake analysis of the recovered materials to investigate early social inequality from a household perspective. Through investigating practices of domestic activities, both commoners' and elites' everyday life can be studied, which offer the potential for examining the whole spectrum of social variation within a given society, and helps to reconstruct the nature and degree of social inequality. This project will incorporate US and Peruvian students from various universities and provide training in different archeological techniques and analysis. The information obtained, which will be the foundation for Chen's dissertation, will be digitalized and made available through the Center for Comparative Archaeology of the University of Pittsburgh. Previous scholarship on the emergence of complex society in Andean prehistory has focused on monument construction, under the presumption that it requires leaders to organize large scale construction projects. The proposed research, however, attempts to shift attention away from magnificent public constructions towards understanding daily household practice. Huaca Negra, a Peruvian coastal site that was occupied from 5,000 to 3,000 B.P in the Viru Valley, had been identified by earlier researchers as a domestic midden mound, and its time span witnessed the emergence of large-scale monument construction on the Peruvian northern and central coast. This makes the site an ideal place to examine both household practices and the development of social inequality. The research will involve a program of excavation and analyses of unearthed materials. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses will be applied to discern the spatial distribution of resources, variation in abundance between households, and diversity in the proportion of different resources. This project will distinguish materials related to the subsistence economy (food), craft production (utilitarian goods) and social networks (trade goods), providing a window onto the process by which certain households might be able to gain unequal access to resources and started to accumulate power to support their leadership.