January 2013: Sara Becker, ‘Working Hard or Hardly Working? A Bioarchaeological Perspective on Labor within the Andean Tiwanaku State (AD 500-1100)’

January 20                 The Dr. George G. Hackman Memorial Lecture

Sara Becker                  Working Hard or Hardly Working? A Bioarchaeological Perspective on Labor within the Andean Tiwanaku State (AD 500-1100)

There are a number of ways to understand how human civilizations have evolved into complex state-level societies. The organization of labor as part of resource management is one way important way. This research is the first to address labor organization and distribution within Tiwanaku (AD 500-1100), one of the earliest Andean states in South America. This study examined the impact that state formation had on patterns of human labor observable on the bones of people who lived during the Tiwanaku state. State structure and social organization was examined through chronological and geographical labor changes associated with the activity of individuals in order to provide a comparative framework of specific skeletal evidence to the extant archaeological record. Also, by examining the age and sex of these laborers, peoples’ gender roles or status differences within this emerging state are discussed. Thus, this research answers questions about what people were doing within the state and at whose authority activities took place, subjects important for archaeological studies of labor within emerging state-level societies.

Sara K. Becker graduated summa cum laud from Arizona State University with a BA in Anthropology. She went on to earn an MA degree with honors from California State University Los Angeles in Biological/Physical Anthropology. While at Cal State Los Angeles, she was a frequent volunteer for the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. Sara also did her thesis research at the National Museum of National History, Smithsonian Institution while on a competitive Graduate Student Fellowship. Sara’s early research was over European contact-era Native American groups around the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. After beginning attendance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for her doctoral program, she has since expanded her anthropological study areas to include Andean South America. Around 2007, Sara began research over Tiwanaku, the earliest Andean state level society in the south central Andes. Her dissertation focused on people laboring within this high elevation state, located about 50 miles outside of present-day La Paz, Bolivia, as well as the colony sites in lower elevation southern Peru, approximately 250 miles from the Tiwanaku core cities. She uses labor as a catalyst to study state formation, gendered work, as well as identity and ethnicity within the development of the Tiwanaku state. In addition, Sara has had her research featured on the Discovery Channel program, “Bone Detectives”. She continues to research labor in the Andes, and hopes to begin an experimental archaeology project in 2013, reconstructing traditional labor methods in the Tiwanaku region with the help of modern Aymara people from this area.