cities (Other Keyword)
1-11 (11 Records)
For thousands of years, plazas have served as spaces for public gatherings. Modern plazas continue to serve many of the same functions as ancient plazas, providing a foundation for comparative studies. Archaeologists have begun to recognize the importance of incorporating modern studies of public spaces into their work, but in order for archaeology to remain relevant, we must engage with and contribute to studies of the modern world. It is necessary for us to work with scholars in these fields...
An archaeological light age: On modernity, urbanism and the materiality of light-based technologies. (2016)
Artificial light is synonymous with modernity and the industrial age. Light turns night into day, guides our way, and transforms place and material. Despite its centrality within the urban experience, light studies are fragmented across a diverse set of fields including, among others, architecture, history, planning and art. Where historical and contemporary archaeology are concerned, light and light-based technologies have received little attention. In 2015, the International Year of Light...
Christchurch: The Most English of New Zealand's Cities? (2016)
Established by the Canterbury Association in 1850, Christchurch, New Zealand, has long been regarded as the most English of New Zealand's cities. This sobriquet - sometimes meant positively, but often used negatively - has been based in large part on the city's appearance. Curiously, however, the validity of this assumption has never really been tested, and certainly has not been tested using archaeological data. The volume of archaeological work in Christchurch since the 2011 earthquakes - 2000...
Formal Open Space and its Relationship to Governance in Premodern Cities (2016)
Formally defined open spaces in cities give people a designated forum for interaction and impact how common people perceive each other and their authority. 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 clarify why formal open spaces exist, both in ancient cities and modern ones. This project stems from...
From Forts to Cities in New France, Passing Through villages. (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Comparative Perspectives on European Colonization in the Americas: Papers in Honor of Réginald Auger" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. For my master’s degree, I worked on the Jacques Cartier Fort site. Later in my career, my work on fortifications became my doctoral project which is the study of French cities in the Americas. Defense structures were important to their conception and design. For my...
Living in an Old City: Practice and theory in urban heritage (2016)
Half of the world’s population now lives in cities. But the heritage of the city can be seen as redundant: a problem to be solved through the right planning mechanism. Urban heritage practice has barely changed for 25 years. It privileges buildings and public realm, tourism, economics. It presumes preservation of fabric. Familiar orthodoxies dominate: ‘urban grain’; ‘the right materials’. It’s western centric. Taste is policed: there is a homogeneity to ‘heritage’. But this has not been how we...
Poultry in Motion: Chickens and Other Domestic Birds in Post-Medieval Cities (2013)
Chickens, turkeys and other domestic avian taxa were brought to and sold at city markets, kept by city-dwellers for various products and contributed to the general sensory experience of being in a city. Unlike other livestock, poultry were inexpensive and possible to husband successfully within the confined spaces characteristic of city life. Little is known about poultry husbandry in the post-medieval period apart from what can be gleaned from documentary sources and research has been limited...
The Same, but Different (2015)
Variations in the architecture, settlement patterns, local environmental context, and occupational history of Maya archaeological sites are difficult to assess. Which differences are culturally meaningful? Which similarities indicate social relationships, and if so what sort of relationships? Which differences are simply a result of local climate and available building materials? In this paper I will examine some of the similarities and differences among the three Maya sites in North-Central...
Settlement scaling in Medieval Europe and Tudor England (2017)
From an archaeological perspective, the settlements of Late Medieval Europe lie far to one end of the social complexity spectrum. But from a modern perspective, they are decidedly ancient. Without the institutions and technologies of modern capitalism or the industrial revolution, Late Medieval settlements are commonly characterized as unproductive consumers within dynamic agrarian economies. Both economists and historians have assumed that the benefits of urban agglomeration economies – their...
Taking Their Water for Our City: Archaeology and Water Rights in New York and Beyond (2016)
Water rights is a social issue of growing importance. Recently, the United Nations declared access to clean drinking water to be a basic human right. Yet financial groups are predicting that water is the next major commodity, to be bought and sold like oil. What few are talking about is the long history of water flowing towards political and social centers, and away from rural populations. As Leith Mullings stated in her presidential address, anthropology pays attention to not only that which is...
Water Infrastructure As An Archaeological Urban Landscape (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology of Cities: Unearthing Complexity in Urban Landscapes", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Water is undoubtedly an essential element for human life. In cities, it creates and configures an infrastructure that involves nature, networks, materials, discourses, and trades, for its use and disposal. This conference will approach the analysis of the archaeological landscape constituted by the...