Political landscapes of late prehispanic Sonora: A view from the Moctezuma Valley

This dissertation offers a reformulation of social organization in eastern Sonora from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries based on survey and excavation data collected in the Moctezuma Valley, Sonora, Mexico. Prior researchers, utilizing Spanish exploration era documents, argued for the presence of territorial polities that controlled large sections of river valleys with an elite class supported by the management of long distance trade. Previous archaeological research demonstrated hierarchy in settlement patterns, but differed in interpretations regarding the methods of "elite" ascendance. This dissertation addresses questions of both the scale of political organization and its likely underpinnings. Multiple data sets including artifact style boundaries, settlement pattern analysis, and consideration of ecological parameters demonstrate political organization rarely reached beyond local sections of river valleys. This suggests dozens of locally autonomous settlement communities were present in an area previously argued to contain less than ten political units. Additionally, application of a diverse set of provenance techniques facilitated testing previous hypothesis regarding exchange in the region. The character of regional exchange systems appears to be mostly through down-the-line acquisition, likely orchestrated by aspirant leaders at the level of local settlement communities. These interactions rarely reached beyond near neighbors and excluded some immediately adjacent settlement communities. In contrast, the exchange of mundane ceramics crossed these same boundaries, indicating different segments of society forged incongruous social networks. In summary, these data suggest the region would be a very poor conduit for long distance exchange, most aspirant leaders had only limited access to social valuables, and that the social landscape was sufficiently volatile that most households sought exterior ties as a means of risk reduction. Local warfare in conjunction with demographic and ecological factors are argued to play the predominant roles in generating the political landscape of eastern Sonora. Overall, small scales of political consolidation and minimal hierarchical control characterized the broader region

Greater post-Neolithic wealth disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a long-term perspective. Although various archaeological proxies for wealth, such as burial goods or exotic or expensive-to-manufacture goods in household assemblages, have been proposed, the first is not clearly connected with households, and the second is confounded by abandonment mode and other factors. As a result, numerous questions remain concerning the growth of wealth disparities, including their connection to the development of domesticated plants and animals and to increases in sociopolitical scale. Here we show that wealth disparities generally increased with the domestication of plants and animals and with increased sociopolitical scale, using Gini coefficients computed over the single consistent proxy of house-size distributions. However, unexpected differences in the responses of societies to these factors in North America and Mesoamerica, and in Eurasia, became evident after the end of the Neolithic period. We argue that the generally higher wealth disparities identified in post-Neolithic Eurasia were initially due to the greater availability of large mammals that could be domesticated, because they allowed more profitable agricultural extensification, and also eventually led to the development of a mounted warrior elite able to expand polities (political units that cohere via identity, ability to mobilize resources, or governance) to sizes that were not possible in North America and Mesoamerica before the arrival of Europeans. We anticipate that this analysis will stimulate other work to enlarge this sample to include societies in South America, Africa, South Asia and Oceania that were under-sampled or not included in this study