Enclosures (Other Keyword)
1-3 (3 Records)
Geometric enclosures found over a 400 sq. km area in Western Amazonia were built in patterned ways that involved depth, width, and morphology of monumental ditches excavated in a clay soil matrix. Pattern eventually included care for solar orientation. A study of 419 geometric enclosures showed that around 60% of them were clearly oriented according to the sun’s trajectory and its maximum distance from the Ecuador, e.g. the solstice. One of the working hypotheses is that the agricultural...
History runs through it: A biography of gorges in Bokoni, South Africa (2015)
Stonewalled enclosures and associated terraces embody the intersection of Bokoni gorge biographies and broader social history. The complex biographies of the gorges include being ritual spaces marked by rock art, iron smelting sites, refugia and strongholds. Many of the uses did not substantially alter the gorges, but in the troubled times of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in southern Africa pre-colonial farmers used stonewalling to reconfigure several gorges in Bokoni. The stonewalled...
Labor, Materials, and Ritual Knowledge: Erecting and Erasing Middle Woodland Enclosures in Southern Appalachia (2015)
Middle Woodland geometric enclosures are among the most complex earthen monuments ever built in Eastern North America. Well-known 19th century maps have long provided archaeologists with a view of their shape, size, and scope, in their final forms. However, because relatively few of these enclosures have been systematically excavated, their early life histories and the ways they may have evolved through time remain enigmatic. In this paper, I seek to document a more complete biography of...