Violence and Inequality

An Archaeological History

Thomas P. Leppard, Sarah C. Murray, Thomas P. Leppard, Sarah C. Murray

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781646424962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781646424979
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence and Inequality explores the deep-time archaeological relationship between violence and inequality, focusing on prehistoric archaeology's contribution to the understanding of the human dynamics among coercive force, aggression, and the state. Detailed archaeological case studies within a strong theoretical framework built from historical studies consider the role of coercive violence in trajectories toward complexity, how levels and types of violence can be traced alongside emerging wealth disparities, and the social role of violence.

The assumption that violence and its threat buttressed elite social control is now challenged from various perspectives. This volume incorporates new models of the relationship between violence and social inequalities into the archaeology of social complexity, building more complicated and nuanced understandings of how different modes of social violence can militate different types of social constitution. Contributions from a variety of methodological angles—such as the bioarchaeology of health and trauma and radiogenic isotope studies and the aesthetics of violence—use a comparative perspective, drawing on data from the Southwestern US, Bronze Age China, early dynastic Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, Roman Britain, and the Andes.
 
Violence and Inequality offers an original and deep history of violence and inequality. Understanding the long-term intersection of violence and inequality and how they support or erode one another is of intrinsic importance, making this work significant to the study of archaeology, economic history, and collective action.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coercion, Violence, and Inequality in Archaeological Perspective
• 1. Violence as a Commons Problem
• 2. Monopolizing the Means of Predation: the Origins of the Andean Sacrifice State
• 3. Arenas of Alterity and the Aesthetics of Religious Violence
• 4. Inequality at Chaco Canyon (900–1150 ce): Creating Subordinates through Coercion and Fear or Ideology and Cohesion
• 5. Seeing Socially Sanctioned Violence: Insights from an Archaeology of Visibility
• 6. Animals, Violence, and Inequality in Ancient Mesopotamia
• 7. The Violence Inherent in (Creating) the System: Inequality, Violence, and Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt
• 8. Embodied Inequality: Skeletal Evidence of Colonization in Roman Britain
• Conclusion: The Many Dimensions of Violence and Inequality
• Index
• About the Authors