There are a number of distinguishing features that mark globalization as a historically significant period. This includes changes in technology which allow for greater levels of economic integration and the international division of labor. At the same time, global communication networks enhance the amount of transnational coordination between social movements. This project details the formation of the anti-globalization network through the history of biodiversity politics. It explores networks in terms of social and technological transformation, but also as distributive phenomenon with unique properties. The research also speculates on the political dynamics of networks.

Abstract not available

Indigenous societies living under colonial control employ strategies to resist political domination and cultural suppression. In the absence of conspicuous nativistic or revitalization movements to promote political autonomy, sociopolitical changes in native societies are ignored or are interpreted as passive compliance. I propose three hypotheses regarding native strategies for autonomy. I evaluate these hypotheses against ethnohistorical and archaeological data from a community of missionized native Americans at Natick, Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth century. In aspects of the native system as basic as settlement and subsistence patterns, the Natick Indians practiced mobility in opposition to the missionaries' program of sedentism. The Natick Indians pursued traditional subsistence practices in contrast to the missionary program of full-time agriculture and cottage industry. Moreover, the Natick Indians traveled outside the geographical confines of their town for more than subsistence needs dictated; they followed a traditional pattern of intergroup visiting for purposes of cementing kin ties, for exchange, for information sharing, and for warfare. In the sphere of politics, despite attempts by missionaries to control the political process in the town, such control remained in the hands of native leaders. In the ritual sphere, shamanistic practices persisted, despite the fact that powwowing was outlawed. I argue that assertion of political and cultural autonomy under conditions of enforced change could occur only if the Natick Indians were mobilized for collective action. In the praying towns an interest group was mobilized by dominant individuals who legitimated their own authority at the same time that they marshalled their followers into a collectivity. I refer to the collectivity mobilized for the pursit of its own political interests as an ethnic group; the ideology manipulated to promote its political-economic interests I refer to as ethnicity. In sum, resistance to colonial domination occurred in Natick--in a community of native Americans who were, according to the colonists' plans, supposed to become the most "acculturated" and dominated group of native Americans in New England. Resistance to colonial policies took the form of the mobilization of material and ideological resources to marshal and coordinate collective political action.

My dissertation focuses on the active role that material culture plays in the formulation, reproduction and modification of early complex societies. I reject the usual archaeological notion that cultural items are passive reflections of behavior and argue, instead, for their active agency in cultural process. In order to understand more clearly the dynamic interaction of material culture with a social context, I have identified a set of eight properties of material items which seem to play particularly important roles in such economic and political areas as maintaining inter- and intra- group boundaries, delimiting access to critical resources, and solidifying social identities (all areas especially relevant to the Formative period). Each of the eight isolated properties of material items is posited as an axis describing the range of variability, so that any specific item can be located on any axis with respect to the full range of variation, but also relative to other items which might be in use in the same cultural context. By assessing items with regard to these eight axes of variability, it becomes possible to predict how effective any class of material items would be in its ability to transmit cultural information and to affect, thereby, the social order. In the following chapters, this framework is applied to an excavated sample of lithic materials from the highland Peru Formative site of Huaricoto. The flake stone tools and biface assemblages from Huaricoto are inspected specifically to assess their positions on the eight posited axes of variability and are found, in general, to exhibit different information transmitting potentials in the flake tool and biface classes. The limited ability of flake tools to affect the social order is discussed and explained. In its conclusions, this study examines the general sensitivity of lithics to the function of mediating social information in Formative society. Referring back to the same axes of variability, I suggest that what I term "co-evolutionary" relationships may exist between different classes of material items, where the adoption or elaboration of one class of material items may affect how other classes of items are produced and used. Co-evolutionary relationships may also explain why, in social rather than in technological terms, the appearance of certain classes of material culture is favored under certain socio-cultural circumstances.

Confusion exists regarding the correlation of the Chavin style and the Early Horizon. An historical analysis of the concepts of Chavin and horizon leads to the conclusion that the Early Horizon begins with the introduction of the style carved in stone at Chavin de Huantar and/or objects normally found in association with this style. Sites previously considered "Chavin" in Nepena have been reassigned to the Initial Period or the Early Horizon given the presence of distinctive architectural and/or ceramic features. Based upon evidence from neighboring valleys, it is concluded that Nepena was sparsely occupied when it was settled at the start of the Early Horizon. A similar seriation of surface artifacts is used to define three phases of Early Horizon settlement for Nepena. Diagnostic ceramic forms and decorative techniques are established for each phase as are characteristic architectural features and patterns of settlement. These phases and their ordering are supported internally by single component sites and externally by stratigraphically-derived sequences. Settlement during Phase I is argued to have occurred via the highlands and in the absence of conflict. Upper valley ridge-top settlement characteristic of this first phase continues during Phase II when defensive architecture first appears. Conflict is argued to have arisen from local competition over control of intervalley exchange and its resolution is viewed as having been achieved by Phase III. At this time a number of upper valley centers characterized by spatially distinct magalithic compounds and ritually-aligned mounds were defended in concert by a network of parapeted fortresses and stone walls. The three phases of settlement derived for Nepena are characterized by ceramic decorative techniques, architectural features and settlement practices distinctive of phases established elsewhere. This serves to highlight the importance, in Peruvian research, of horizon technique as an investigative tool, surface survey as an investigative method, Early Horizon as a conceptual framework and warfare as a key feature in the development of complex society.

Some anthropologists have argued that communal hunts played an important role in the evolution of hominids. Variation in the frequency and timing of bison hunts on the Great Plains has been explained with the Annual, Vore, and Fat Depletion Models. According to the Annual Model, hunts were organized in the fall to obtain stores of meat for consumption during the winter. The Vore Model refines the Annual Model by proposing that larger and more frequent bison kills occurred during periods with higher precipitation, better grazing conditions, and greater numbers of bison. Different animals may be more intensively butchered and processed to obtain meat from fatter bison, even when many animals were malnourished. Expectations of the Vore and Annual Models are not supported by the analysis of dates, bison remains (dental wear and pathologies, post-cranial cortical thickness), and paleoclimatic indicators recovered from kill-sites throughout the Plains. The proportion and numbers of kill-sites are too low to represent annual events. Almost as many kills occurred in the spring and the fall. Many hunts were accomplished when the bison were in poor health and under diverse grazing and environmental conditions. Instead of being a response to subsistence and environmental problems, many communal hunts served to mediate social and political tensions by providing food and exchangeable items for human aggregations. Feasting, ceremonies, and exchanges could instill a sense of solidarity among participants and contribute to the mediation of tensions created by differences in power, wealth, gender, and age.

One of the challenges facing anthropological archaeology is to provide insights into the social, economic, and political workings of non-stratified societies in prehistory through the study of material culture. The material culture associated with these societies is seen by many archaeologists as conservative, responding primarily to functional requirements or to environmental changes. From a social perspective, however, both innovation and the absence of change in material culture must be explicable in terms that link the social strategies of human actors to production activities. Production is a central concept for understanding the nature of surpluses, the division of labor, and the relationship between production and consumption. The dissertation has two goals: (1) to develop a model of a particular kind of production--craft specialization in stone tool manufacture--which may be applied to non-stratified societies; and (2) to evaluate such a model against data from three archaeological sites in Maine which contain Late Archaic Period components associated with the Susquehanna Tradition (ca. 4,000-2,800 B.P.). Craft specialization is often seen as a defining property of stratified societies, involving full-time artisans, regional exchange, and control by an elite class. In non-stratified societies, craft specialization is best seen as a situation in which the production of certain items is limited de facto to a segment of the population. The Susquehanna Tradition of northeast North America was selected for examination because of its distinctive lithic technology and broad, thin biface forms. In all, 517 bifaces from the Turner Farm, Hirundo, and Young sites in Maine were examined. The sample included bifaces from both mortuary and habitation contexts. Twelve axes were identified along which there should be variation with an increased commitment to specialized production. The analysis focused on the question of segmentation in production through the identification of preforms, standardization in biface proportions, and hafting techniques. The results supported the position that preform production was restricted within the population, while modification for hafting was practiced generally by the "consumers" of preforms within the society. The focus on specialized production encourages social explanations for individual archaeological sites, the Susquehanna Tradition, the Late Archaic Period, and non-stratified societies in general.

Social processes of production which articulate with hunter-gatherer mobility are systematically examined. Mobility is particularly crucial in the context of egalitarian social relations. Hunter-gatherers determine mobility and constitute space by manipulating production to create social relations. Production processes that are organized to promote economic interdependence, equity, and cooperative labor limit mobility and lead to situations in which autonomy is contested. A methodology is developed to make these social processes visible to the archaeologist. Data from the third millennium before the present from southern New England provide the context for exploring social processes of mobility. Viewed in this light, the archaeological record of the third millennium can be seen as the result of considerable tension in the social organization of production. By explicitly developing a set of social arguments and bringing them to bear on archaeological data, I expose variation similar to that predicted by models of resource distribution. These arguments recognize the richness, ambiguities and contradictions of the data that are an outcome and a part of human strategies of acting and interacting with material culture in the social arena. The social arguments developed here apply to and aid in understanding archaeological assemblages from other times or places.

The complex hunter-gatherer debate is dominated by reductionist ecofunctionalist approaches. A critique of these approaches is developed from a postprocessual stance informed by structuration theory. The geographical locus of the study is the circumpolar zone. The north Norwegian Stone Age is the primary empirical entry point and the Maritime Archaic of Labrador is used for comparative purposes. Complexity is approached from the perspective of lithic procurement. North Norwegian chert sources are described and the distribution of chert is assessed through petrographic and geochemical analysis. Three conflicting interpretations derived from different paradigmatic contexts are presented: (1) an ecological model linking lithic procurement to mobility patterns, (2) an argument that lithic procurement is structured by a "big-man" political economy, and (3) a spatial-ideological model positing a contextual relationship between chert sources and rock carvings, seeing these as articulating a regional system of political-semiotic discourse. Traditional comparisons between the north Norwegian Stone Age and the Labrador Maritime Archaic emphasize similarities in social elaboration based on maritime adaptations. However, when structuration processes are compared, important differences in complexity processes are evident. These comparative observations raise additional challenges to ecofunctionalist reductionism.

Includes bibliographical references.