The Labor of Building a Community: Exploring the Divergent Trajectories of Complex Sites in Copper Age Iberia

Human skeletal remains, valuable because they provide evidence of both the embodied or “lived” experiences that materialize osteologically and the “performed” roles and identities displayed in funerary practices, provide a key line of evidence with which to assess the variable emergence of inequalit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American anthropologist 2020-12, Vol.122 (4), p.896-901
Main Author: Beck, Jess
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient civilizations
Archaeology
Community
Community development
Copper Age
Diet
Inequality
Moderation
Osteology
Prehistoric era
Social identity
Social mobility
Strategies
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Summary:Human skeletal remains, valuable because they provide evidence of both the embodied or “lived” experiences that materialize osteologically and the “performed” roles and identities displayed in funerary practices, provide a key line of evidence with which to assess the variable emergence of inequalities at complex sites of the Iberian third millennium (Quinn and Beck 2016). While human skeletal remains do not perfectly encode evidence of all lived experiences, as Juengst (this forum) underscores, osteological data still provide key information about social identity, diet, and mobility at both the individual and the community level. Moving forward, I will briefly document the available bioarchaeological and mortuary evidence at three key complex Copper Age sites—Los Millares, Valencina de la Concepción, and Marroquíes—to argue that the Iberian record shows evidence for a variety of organizational strategies that led to either the amplification or moderation of institutionalized inequality.
ISSN:0002-7294
1548-1433
DOI:10.1111/aman.13498