Suchergebnisse

"Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security"--

O ato de pintar um desenho é uma forma de agência, e o estilo geral deste desenho pode ser conceitualizado, em parte, como um tipo de estrutura. Esta perspectiva é usada como base para a análise de mudanças cronológicas nos desenhos de cerâmicas preto-e-branca Mimbres (ca. 750-1150 AD) do sudoeste do novo México. O foco específico se volta à uma metodologia que pode ser usada para detectarinovações, isto é, a introdução de novos desenhos que são incorporados ao corpus de desenhos e assim transformam a estrutura. A conceitualização de uma tradição particular (neste caso, pinturas cerâmicas) como uma forma de estrutura análoga à estrutura geral, no sentido de Giddens, fornece importantes vislumbres sobre a recorrente relação entre agência e estrutura.

Archaeological research on abandonments has focused primarily on their causes, as though they were final events. This article investigates the abandonment at the end of the Mimbres Classic Period as a process of reorganization within a larger social context. Analyses of pottery and architecture demonstrate that previously homogeneous material culture was replaced by a diversity of technological styles. These material changes indicate that the reorganization involved the development of broader regional ties and the redefinition of community.

ABSTRACT  Change is inevitable, but some changes and transformations are more dramatic and fraught with suffering than others. Resilience theory suggests the concept of a "rigidity trap" as an explanation for these differences. In rigidity traps, a high degree of connectivity and the suppression of innovation prolong an increasingly rigid state, with the result that the eventual transformation is harsh. Three archaeological cases from the U.S. Southwest (Mimbres, Mesa Verde, and Hohokam) and new methods for assessing transformations and rigidity are used to evaluate this concept. They reveal the expected association between the severity of transformation and degree of rigidity, suggesting that a rigidity trap contributed to the Hohokam decline, which included significant human suffering. Possible causes of rigidity, with implications for today's world, are explored.