This study examines almost 5000 lithic artifacts from three rockshelters in the Belize, part of the Maya Lowlands. These sites bear evidence of human occupation throughout the last 14,000 years, a period over which I assess change in four lithic traits: 1) cortex, or the weathered outer surface of a toolstone cobble; 2) platform type, or the degree of preparation of striking platforms; 3) bifaciality, or whether tools were flaked on one or both faces; and 4) retouch, or the removal of small flakes from tool edges. These traits are differentially associated with two modes of technological organization: curation and expedience. Curation involves greater effort spent creating tools with longer use-lives and is associated with low levels of cortex, more complex platforms, more bifacial flaking, and higher amounts of retouch. It is also more typical of highly mobile hunter-gatherers who move their residential base often. Expedience, which entails less effort creating lithics with shorter use-lives, is associated with higher amounts of cortex, simpler platforms, less bifacial flaking, and lower levels of retouch; it is also associated with more sedentary hunter-gatherers. My results indicate that, during the Late Pleistocene in Belize, groups favored curation and were likely highly mobile foragers inhabiting an open grassland landscape. However, not long after the Pleistocene-ending Younger Dryas climatic event (~12,600 to 11,700 cal BP), these groups began to favor expedience, indicating they’d begun to adopt a more sedentary lifestyle. This shift towards expedience and sedentism continued throughout the Early and Middle Holocene, when closed-canopy tropical forests came to dominate the landscape. I conclude that these foragers began to adopt lower levels of residential mobility much earlier than generally thought. Because the sparse, unpredictable nature of wild tropical forest flora and fauna favors high residential mobility, this means they were likely manipulating their landscapes and experimenting with cultivars several millennia before the first appearance of sedentary farming villages. This further implies that the origins of sedentism and agriculture in tropical forests must be sought in the changing lifeways of pre-agricultural, semi-sedentary forager-horticulturalists of the deep past.

This research combines traditional archaeological analysis with lidar data to investigate infrastructure, residential architecture, and neighborhoods in a completely new way. Taken together, these analyses show the shape and form of this city during its apogee in CE 650, while providing a deeper understanding of its civic administration through the use of multiple urban levels (citywide, district, neighborhood, and residential/plazuela). Independently, any one of these results may provide an incomplete picture or inaccurate conclusion, but, when conjoined, the analyses interdigitate to shed light on the city as a whole. This research showcases the physical infrastructural power of this city through the widespread distribution of its urban services among the city’s districts while still highlighting tiers of urban services among districts. It reinforces the idea of household architectural autonomy through the lack of standardization in the built environment, while also highlighting the relative equality of residences. And, it emphasizes both citywide and neighborhood-based similarities in categorical identities that would have facilitated collective action among individuals in the past by reducing the friction to initiate collective endeavors. Taken together, these results suggest both autocratic and collective governance, and views from different urban levels when combined provide a more detailed perspective on the multiple interacting and concurrent processes that determined urban life and structure in the past. These analyses also hold the potential to shed light on other governance practices in future comparative urban research on archaeological, historical, and modern cities. However, the initial findings reported in this dissertation suggest that Caracol enjoyed a more collective system of governance processes despite the hieroglyphic record of a lineage of rulers.

Slavery is a significant factor to consider when studying Mexica society and its economy, including societal roles and gendered labor. Many scholars who explore slavery within this culture and state look at the topic from specific angles and focus on the post-conquest and colonial periods. Pre-Columbian slavery is mentioned only briefly in the histories of the Mexica despite it being a key facet of their way of life. Questions of gender and class in relation to slavery are often missing from examinations of the topic. This project will, therefore, examine the process of enslavement, slave status and labor, and the written and visual evidence of enslaved individuals within Mexica society during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. By specifically examining slavery within the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and the Mexica region, this thesis will argue that enslaved women played a much more significant role than enslaved men, and that slaves constituted a social class in pre-Columbian Mexica society.

People come together and form communities in cities across the world but the processes behind community formation are not well understood. Some researchers theorize that having populations with similar characteristics is important; others argue that the existence of public spaces for interaction is key. I use archaeological data collected over six seasons of field work and archival data from The Granada Relocation Center (Amache) National Historic Landmark, a World War II (WWII) Japanese American incarceration center in Southeastern Colorado, to demonstrate the role that participation in previous social communities has on the formation of new social networks. The concept of social cohesion acts as a framework for understanding how access to public spaces and participation in different types of social activities creates a sense of neighborhood community among a dislocated population.

During WWII Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast to ten incarceration centers, disrupting existing communities and forcing the formation of new ones. Amache is one of ten incarceration centers which housed families and individuals. The site resembled an urban center with public facilities and residential areas that functioned as neighborhoods. Archival and archaeological data indicate that residents developed socially defined neighborhoods. Internees modified each neighborhood through the creation of landscape features and development of social activity which provided a venue for residents to interact and form a sense of community identity.

Neighborhood residents clustered based on their affiliation to previous communities both in California and in the temporary detention centers. Clustering in demographically similar neighborhoods facilitated the development of new social interactions and led to the proliferation of landscape features and social events seen in the archaeological and archival record. I identify patterns of neighborhood interaction through an examination of the archaeological record and social network analysis using archival newspapers. Applying archaeological data in partnership with social network data illustrates the range of strategies used by incarcerees to create new communities and problematizes working with a single data source when attempting to identify socially defined neighborhoods.

I propose a new approach for the analysis of social transformations within the context of colonialism. Drawing on concepts used by historical sociologists, combined with insights from historians and archaeologists, I forge a synthesis of relational mechanisms that concatenated into processes of categorical change. Within the social sciences, mechanisms are formally defined as specific classes of events or social interactions that are causally linked and tend to repeat under specific conditions, potentially resulting in widespread social transformations. Examples of mechanisms include formal inscription through spatial segregation and adjustments in individual position through socioeconomic mobility.

For New Spain, historians have identified at least three macroscale shifts in the social structure of the viceroyalty. I examine the mechanisms that led to these changes in two distinct contexts. The Port of Veracruz (Mexico), located along the main axis of colonial exchange, offers a shifting baseline for comparison of the long-term trajectory of colonial interaction and categorical change. I undertake a finer grain study at the borderland presidios of Northwest Florida, where three presidios were sequentially occupied (AD 1698-1763) and historically linked to Veracruz through formal recruitment and governmental supply.

My analysis draws on two independent lines of evidence. Historically, I examine census records, maps, and other colonial documents. Archaeologically, I assess change in interaction mainly through technological style analysis, compositional characterization, and the distribution of low visibility plain and lead-glazed utilitarian wares. I document the active expression of social categories through changing consumption of highly visible serving vessels.

This study demonstrates that colonial transformations were driven locally from the bottom up and through the top-down responses of local and imperial elites who attempted to maintain control over labor and resources. Social changes in Florida and Veracruz were distinct based upon initial conditions and historical contingencies, yet simultaneously were influenced by and contributed to broad trajectories of macroscale colonial transformations.

The Egyptian New Kingdom city of Akhetaten (modern: Tell el-Amarna, el-Amarna, or simply Amarna) provides a unique opportunity to study ancient biocultural dynamics. It was a disembedded capital removed from the major power bases of Memphis and Thebes that was built, occupied, and abandoned within approximately 20 years (c. 1352–1336 BCE). This dissertation used the recently excavated Amarna South Tombs cemetery to test competing models for the development of disembedded capitals, such as the geographic origin of its migrants and its demographic structure in comparison to contrastive models for the establishment of settlements. The degree to which biological relatedness organized the South Tombs cemetery was also explored. The results suggest that the Nile Valley into the New Kingdom (1539–1186 BCE) was very diverse in dental cervical phenotype and thus highly mobile in respects to gene flow, failing to reject that the Amarna city was populated by individuals and families throughout the Nile Valley. In comparison, the Amarna South Tombs cemetery contained the least amount of dental phenotypic diversity, supporting a founder effect due to migration from larger, more diverse gene pools to the city or the very fact that the city and sample only reflect a 20-year interval with little time to accumulate phenotypic variation. Parts of the South Tombs cemetery also appear to be organized by biological affinity, showing consistent and significant spatial autocorrelation with biological distances generated from dental cervical measurements in male, female, and subadult (10–19 years of age) burials closest to the South Tombs. This arrangement mimics the same orderliness in the residential areas of the Amarna city itself with officials surrounded by families that supported their administration. Throughout the cemetery, adult female grave shaft distances predict their biological distances, signaling a nuclear family dynamic that included many females including mothers, widows, and unwed aunts, nieces, and daughters. A sophisticated paleodemographic model using simulated annealing optimization projected the living population of the South Tombs cemetery, which overall conformed to a transplanted community similar to 19th century mill villages of the United States and United Kingdom.

An important part of the layout of a city is the nature of formally defined open spaces that give people a designated forum for interaction, help them navigate the stress of a dense population, and impact how common people perceive each other and their authority and how they move through the built environment. There is a critical lack of understanding of the origin of these spaces in the earliest cities and their social contexts. I will examine a sample of premodern cities, including archaeologically and historically documented examples, to provide more clarity as to why formal open spaces exist, both in ancient cities and modern ones. This project stems from the larger one: "Service Access in Premodern Cities" at ASU, a project dedicated to transdisciplinary research on comparative urbanism. Each of the cities in this projects have been scored on a scale of governance based on that of Blanton and Fargher (2007).I will measure the formal open space in these cities using GIS. Relating plaza area to the size of the city and the form of governance will show whether or not plazas can be classified as a public good according to Blanton and Fargher's classification and whether cross-cultural patterns exist regarding the relationship of governance to public space. A development of this more complex understanding of the dynamics of early cities and their governance is critical to understanding the evolution of both human society and the modern city.

During the current excavations at Calixtlahuaca, many aspects of its urban landscape have been uncovered. By using these details, my objective is to determine the political environment of the site. However, in Mesoamerican archaeology, there has been little evaluation of the politics in smaller city-states as compared to larger ones such as Tenochtitlan. In order to solve this dilemma, I compared Calixtlahuaca to two groups of Mesoamerican capital cities: (1) city-state centers such as Cholula, Tlaxcallan, various Aztec city-states; and (2) hillside sites similar to Calixtlahuaca in topographic placement. The importance of certain elements in these sites is more heavily considered than others and sites that have pre-existing knowledge about their political systems took precedence. By comparing urban aspects of these sites including location, population, density, urban layout, and urban architecture, I have created a model that relates urban form to political organization. I applied this model to infer the political organization of Calixtlahuaca. This model can later be applied throughout Mesoamerica and eventually to sites at other regions.