Profile: Aimée Plourde

Aimée completed her undergraduate studies in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, before pursuing a master´s degree and Ph.D. in anthropology at UCLA, with specializations in archaeology and evolutionary anthropology. She came to the U.K. to pursue postdoctoral research at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, funded by a US National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship, and was a teaching fellow in biological anthropology at the University of Bristol, prior to coming to Sheffield.

Aimée´s is most broadly interested in the co-evolution of humans´ cognitive capacity for culture with the growing complexity and importance of cultural norms and practices, and why and how norms that organize social relationships change over time. In particular, her work has focused on the question of how, in an absence of wealth differences and formalized social roles of authority, social dynamics in early human communities sometimes changed in ways that allowed such institutionalized inequalities in wealth and social power to emerge, with an emphasis on the cognitive and social processes underlying prestige dynamics, and the use of prestige goods.

Aimée conducts archaeological fieldwork on this topic in the Lake Titicaca Basin region of the south-central Andean highlands of Peru, South America. Her current project, in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Arkush (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), focuses on the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1275) in the northern Basin, a tumultuous period of extended drought, political fragmentation, and intense inter- and intra-ethnic conflict during which people in the Titicaca Basin discarded millennium-long traditions of ceremonial architecture, religious iconography, and elite privilege, and developed new ways of ordering society and beliefs. We will be addressing basic questions about how political networks across space are maintained and how status and centralized leadership, including prestige dynamics, are expressed or minimized in times of severe social disruption and hardship.

She is currently a postdoctoral research associate for the AHRC Culture and the Mind Project.

Recent Publications

• Plourde, A.M. (in press). Human Power and Prestige Systems. In Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universal, P. Kappeler and J. Silk (eds.), Springer Verlag.
• Plourde, A.M. (2009). Prestige goods and the formation of political hierarchy – a costly signaling model. In: Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution, edited by Stephen Shennan, University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Plourde, A.M. (2008). A costly signaling model of the origins of prestige goods, and their subsequent role in the emergence of formalized leadership roles and social ranking. Human Nature 19(4): 374-388.
• Plourde, A.M. and Stanish, C. (2006). The emergence of complex society in the Titicaca Basin: the view from the north. In Andean Archaeology III: North and South, W. H. Isbell and H. Silverman (eds.), Kluwer/Plenum, New York.

Contact

Aimée Plourde
Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies
Humanities Research Institute
The University of Sheffield
34 Gell Street
Sheffield
S3 7QY

Telephone: 0114 222 6117

Fax: 0114 222 9894

Email: A.Plourde@sheffield.ac.uk