Traveling things and the production of social spaces: An archaeological study of circulation and value in north western Argentina.

摘要

This dissertation is an archaeological investigation of the centrality of circulation and materiality in the daily life of south-central Andean sedentary societies during the first millennium AD. The investigation particularly concentrates on four archaeological settlements located on the western slope of the Aconquija Sierra in north-western Argentina. Exploring different spatial scales, the research traces the movements and associations of lithic artifacts and ceramics in archaeological contexts in the region. Drawing on the results of the technological analysis of lithics and provenance studies of obsidian and ceramics, this dissertation argues that long-distance mundane artifacts channeled the regional social world into the intimate realm of everyday life through their powers to evoke other places and people. Following recent developments in material culture and landscape studies, the evidence provided by these analyses is interpreted as indicating technological and aesthetic practices that organized past people's experience and understanding of the social field, and enabled the production and reproduction of social life at various scales.;Through the use of mundane objects that came from afar in everyday tasks, local life became entangled with a wider social world. Truly embedded in a culture of relatedness and circulation, local processes of production and consumption participated in the creation of a multi-layered social universe through the mediation of a uniquely rich and complex assemblage of artifacts. This research establishes that narrow conceptualizations of social interaction, value and technological practice are insufficient to understand the nuances of these social processes. In this way, this dissertation contributes to the revision of utilitarian notions of value and technology in archaeology, as well as to the wider debate in the social sciences on the constitutive role of the sphere of circulation.