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The Sinagua And Aggregation: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Cultural Development, Joshua Aaron Piker

Honors Papers

Archaeology is, like any good sub-field of anthropology, concerned with the descriptions of, and comparisons between, cultural systems. The evidence used by archaeologists is, however, often of a very different nature than that used by ethnographers or linguists. Language is, of course, not preserved in the archaeological record, and many of the everyday behaviors that ethnographers are able to take for granted are invisible at a distance of two thousand years. This paper will be concerned with the study of social organization and group dynamics. However, determining the "structure" of a prehistoric society is notoriously difficult. Benson has stated that …