CLST 129 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Acoma Pueblo, Agglomerate, Gift Economy

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Classical Studies
• Course: CLST 129
• Professor: Anne Foley

Document Summary

Social organization in the present and the past. Social and cultural anthropology: on living societies, based on direct study and access to all kind of information. The time period is relatively short: present societies and their very recent past. Social archaeology: on ancient societies, based on the surviving archaeological record (and written sources, if available). Top-down: the forms of social organization studied in general. Bottom-up: the individual and the way s/he defines and thinks her/his identity within the social group, on the ground of a number of factors (status, gender, age). Not the social organization in general, but the individual experience and perception of the social organization. Establishing the nature and scale of the society. Study of settlement pattern to get evidence on the relationship between individual sites. Written records, if available, and oral tradition. Study of present-day societies from the archaeological point of view, with the goal of understanding past societies by comparison (ethno-archaeology)