Home → News & Events → Events Calendar → Friday Seminar: Amber VanDerwarker
Document Actions

Friday Seminar: Amber VanDerwarker

by eric — last modified October 25, 2010 03:47 PM
What Friday Seminar
When November 19, 2010
from 04:00 pm to 06:00 pm
Where A 222 Fowler
Contact Name Lana Martin
Contact Email
Add event to calendar vCal
iCal

Multiple Pathways to Intensification: Maize Production in the New World

By Amber M. VanDerwarker, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara

 

Most discussions of agricultural intensification link this process to political development, in which intensification either spurs or is spurred by political development. Several recent publications, however, have questioned this necessary linkage, citing cases of intensification in the absence of political development, as well as demonstrating intensification occurring at the household level, disassociated from larger institutional decision-making bodies. This talk considers multiple causes of intensification through a consideration of the timing of maize production relative to key cultural developments in several regions of the New World. Ultimately, while political development is often correlated with agricultural intensification, there are clear cases where (1) timing is variable, (2) complexity can occur without intensification or vice-versa, and (3) other causal factors are at work.

Part of the Fall 2010 series "Food for Thought: The Archaeology of Diet and Subsistence." Guest scholars explore approaches to and methods of investigating the foodways of past human societies.

 

secondaryNav

Secondary Navigation

featPub

Featured Publication

featured pub picture

The Construction of Value

Scholars from Aristotle to Marx and beyond have been fascinated by the question of what constitutes value. The Construction of Value in the Ancient World makes a significant contribution to this ongoing inquiry, bringing together in one comprehensive volume the perspectives of leading anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, philologists, and sociologists on how value was created, defined, and expressed in a number of ancient societies around the world. Based on the basic premise that value is a social construct defined by the cultural context in which it is situated, the volume explores four overarching but closely interrelated themes: place value, body value, object value, and number value. The questions raised and addressed are of central importance to archaeologists studying ancient civilizations: How can we understand the value that might have been accorded to materials, objects, people, places, and patterns of action by those who produced or used the things that compose the human material record? Taken as a whole, the contributions to this volume demonstrate how the concept of value lies at the intersection of individual and collective tastes, desires, sentiments, and attitudes that inform the ways people select, or give priority to, one thing over another.

Available now!

utilityNav

Utility Navigation

 
Personal tools