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Ancestral Pueblo Villages and the Panoptic Gaze of the Commune

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2011

William M. Graves  and
Scott Van Keuren
William M. Graves
Affiliation:
Statistical Research, Inc., 6099 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson, AZ 85712, USA, Email: bgraves@sricrm.com
Scott Van Keuren
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05401, USA, Email: svankeur@uvm.edu
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Abstract

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 263 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2011

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