Proceedings from a session held as part of the XVII World UISPP Congress, Burgos, 2014. The theme of the symposium was the archaeology of earthen architecture in pre- and protohistoric cultures, with an emphasis on constructive techniques and systems, and diachronic changes in those aspects.
Proceedings from a session held as part of the XVII World UISPP Congress, Burgos, 2014. The theme of the symposium was the archaeology of earthen architecture in pre- and protohistoric cultures, with an emphasis on constructive techniques and systems, and diachronic changes in those aspects.
Presents papers from Session IV-5 of the 18th UISPP World Congress (Paris, June 2018). The archaeological study of earthen construction has until now focused on typology and conservation; papers here instead consider their construction and anthropological importance.
The idea that societies and rulers express their power through monumental architecture is not a new one, but this collection of essays, the result of a 2002 conference in Leuven, takes the arguement back to the very beginnings of monumental architecture in the Bronze Age Near East and Aegean, to ask if this process can be linked to a particular ...
This volume uses case studies to capture the recent emphasis on history in archaeological reconstructions of America’s deep past. Previously, archaeologists studying “prehistoric” America focused on long-term evolutionary change, imagining ancient societies like living organisms slowly adapting to environmental challenges. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how today’s researchers are incorporating a new awareness that the precolonial era was also shaped by people responding to historical trends and forces. Essays in this volume delve into sites across what is now the United States Southeast—the St. Johns River Valley, the Gulf Coast, Greater Cahokia, Fort Ancient, the southern Appalachians, and the Savannah River Valley. Prominent scholars of the region highlight the complex interplay of events, human decision-making, movements, and structural elements that combined to shape native societies. The research in this volume represents a profound shift in thinking about precolonial and colonial history and begins to erase the false divide between ancient and contemporary America. Contributors: Susan M. Alt | Robin Beck | Eric E. Bowne | Robert A. Cook | Robbie Ethridge | Jon Bernard Marcoux | Timothy R. Pauketat | Thomas J. Pluckhahn | Asa R. Randall | Christopher B. Rodning | Kenneth E. Sassaman | Lynne P. Sullivan | Victor D. Thompson | Neill J. Wallis | John E. Worth A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
In Relational Engagements of the Indigenous Americas, Melissa R. Baltus and Sarah E. Baires critically examine the current understanding of relationality in the Americas, covering a diverse range of topics from Indigenous cosmologies to the life-world of the Inuit dog. The contributors to this wide-ranging edited collection interrogate and discuss the multiple natures of relational ontologies, touching on the ever-changing, fluid, and varied ways that people, both alive and dead, relate and related to their surrounding world. While the case studies presented in this collection all stem from the New World, the Indigenous histories and archaeological interpretations vary widely and the boundaries of relational theory challenge current preconceptions about earlier ways of life in the Indigenous Americas.
In this collection, prominent archaeologists explore the sophisticated political and logistical organizations that were required to plan and complete the architectural marvels of ancient civilisations. They discuss the long-term political, social, and military impacts these projects had on their respective civilisations and illuminate the significance of monumentality among early complex societies in the Americas.
In this study, I develop an integrative approach by which archaeologists can analyze the relationship between the built environment and human behaviour in ancient societies. I then apply it to an investigation of how elites employed monumental architecture as a means of advancing their sociopolitical power during the Late Cypriot (LC) Bronze Age (c. 1750-1050 BCE). The study begins by outlining a theoretical approach that emphasizes the role of buildings in controlling movement and encounter and in serving as the contexts for interactions through which sociopolitical structures are developed, maintained, transformed and reproduced. A review of previous studies of ancient Cypriot architecture, typically dominated by art-historical and functionalist interpretations, highlights the need for such an approach. To examine these issues, I introduce a series of analytical methods derived from architectural and environment-behaviour studies. While access analysis determines likely contexts for interaction based on the integration of individual spaces within a building's layout, a nonverbal communication approach, combined with visibility analysis, addresses how meanings are encoded in various elements of the built environment and how these meanings might engender particular behaviours among a building's inhabitants and visitors. I use this integrative approach to isolate likely contexts for public-inclusive and private-exclusive social occasions in a number of monumental buildings from the sites of Enkomi, Kalavasos, Maroni and Alassa. These buildings provided contexts well suited to social occasions, such as ceremonial feasting and religious rituals, that created social bonds or emphasized social distance as the sociopolitical objectives of interaction required. I argue the necessity of seeing these contexts not simply as spaces, but as socially-constructed places, imbued with identity and memory. This study highlights the importance of ashlar masonry, doorways and hearths in the definition of physical and social boundaries that were integral to the creation and negotiation of status and individual and group identities during social occasions. I conclude that during the LC IIC-IIIA period, ruling elites on Cyprus embarked on an ambitious strategy of monumental place-making that provided contexts for interactions that ultimately supported their power. In this way, monumental buildings became the primary arenas in which the sociopolitical dynamics of LC society were played out.
On October 14-19, 1990, the 6th International Conference on the Conservation of Earthen Architecture was held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Sponsored by the GCI, the Museum of New Mexico State Monuments, ICCROM, CRATerre-EAG, and the National Park Service, under the aegis of US/ICOMOS, the event was organized to promote the exchange of ideas, techniques, and research findings on the conservation of earthen architecture. Presentations at the conference covered a diversity of subjects, including the historic traditions of earthen architecture, conservation and restoration, site preservation, studies in consolidation and seismic mitigation, and examinations of moisture problems, clay chemistry, and microstructures. In discussions that focused on the future, the application of modern technologies and materials to site conservation was urged, as was using scientific knowledge of existing structures in the creation of new, low-cost, earthen architecture housing.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
