Event: Pizza Talk: "Bone Weary: Labor in the South American Tiwanaku State (AD 500-1100) from a Bioarchaeological Perspective"

Speaker: 

Sara Becker, Assistant Professor, UC Riverside

There are a number of approaches in understanding how human civilizations evolved into complex, state-level societies. Labor organization as part of resource management is one way to distinguish these changes and bioarchaeology provides a unique opportunity to study the remains of the actual people who worked within these communities. This research addresses labor organization and distribution within Tiwanaku (AD 500-1100), one of the earliest Andean states in South America. This study examines the impact that state formation had on patterns of human labor observable on the bones of people who lived during the Tiwanaku state. State structure and social organization were evaluated through temporal and spatial labor changes associated with the activity of individuals, in order to provide a comparative framework of specic skeletal evidence to the extant archaeological record. Also, by examining the age and sex of these laborers, peoples’ gender roles or status dierences within this emerging state can be discussed. This investigation answers questions about what tasks people were doing within Tiwanaku, how the state was organized, as well as highlights the importance of reciprocal communal labor networks in order for a complex Andean society to function successfully

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