Placemaking (Other Keyword)
1-12 (12 Records)
The Bight of Benin region is well known as a locale filled with poignant places associated with the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved individuals. This paper follows recent efforts in the region aimed at writing landscape features into deeper historic narratives and exploring them in terms of broader political and economic processes. In so doing, it pushes beyond coastal points of loss and into dynamic cosmopolitan interior places. It argues that the historical and archaeological arc of...
Encapsulating Diversity in 19thCentury Los Angeles: An Archaeological Analysis of the Los Angeles/ Depot Hotel (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "California: Post-1850s Consumption and Use Patterns in Negotiated Spaces" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In 2001, the California Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) purchased the territory of what is now the Los Angeles State Historic Park located in downtown Los Angeles. The land has a diverse and complex history, intertwined with Gabrieliño Tongva, Spanish, Mexican and American ownership. Amongst...
Landschaft and Placemaking at George Washington’s Ferry Farm (2013)
Ferry Farm is perhaps most well known as the site of George Washington’s boyhood home. However, between the early 18th century and the Civil War, it was intermittently the site of multiple occupations, including the home of a former indentured servant, the home of an overseer and his enslaved wife, in addition to the Washington's and their enslaved domestic servants. The homes these families constructed were part of a dynamic landscape that shifted meaning and context throughout time. This paper...
A "Little Alsace" for the Lone Star State: Alsatian Migration and the Construction of Place, Narrative, and Identity on the Texas Frontier (2018)
This paper examines placemaking and identity in the Alsatian colonies of Texas. On the eve of Texas statehood, Alsatian migrants settled lands to the west of San Antonio. Displaced or disenfranchised by the turmoil of 19th century Europe, Alsatian families, often farmers, responded to advertisements by empresarios touting free passage, land, and opportunity in a "land of milk and honey." They arrived unprepared for the harsh realities of the Texas landscape, particularly life on the Republic’s...
A Microbotanical View of Classic Period Households in Central Yaxuna, Yucatán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya city of Yaxuna was a political and economic center of the northern lowlands in the Middle to Late Preclassic periods (1000 BC–AD 250), and residents continued to occupy the city through the Classic period (AD 250–900) amid geopolitical shifts in the region tied to the rise of Coba and the Late Classic (AD 600–800) construction of a...
Mortuary Landscapes and Placemaking through Veneration at the Maya Site of Colha (2018)
Traces of veneration are sedimented within the landscape and the collective memory of its occupants, transforming these spaces into places. Such palimpsests become potent, which, in the case of mortuary landscapes, can manifest in increasingly complex burial rituals through time. The 2017 excavations at Colha revealed a series of 9 interments in the main plaza of the 2000 sector, yielding a minimum number of 13 individuals. This mortuary area initially utilized during the Middle Preclassic was...
Mortuary Practice and Placemaking: The Establishment of a Cemetery during the Preceramic-Preclassic Transition at Ceibal, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent investigations in the Amoch Group of Ceibal, a minor ceremonial complex located outside of the site epicenter, have provided new insights into the transition from the Preceramic to the Middle Preclassic periods in the Maya lowlands (ca. 1000 BC). Previous investigations in the civic-ceremonial core of Ceibal revealed an E Group dating to around 950...
Moving Places: The Creation of Quilcapama (2016)
During the Middle Horizon (AD 650-1050), the site of Quilcapampa la Antiqua in the Sihuas Valley of southern Peru grew from a small village into a major political center. This chapter considers how the growth of Quilcapampa was linked in part to the experiences of people passing through this location. Drawing on Alfred Gell’s idea of “technologies of enchantment”, we examine how the site’s associated geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and pathways marked and gave meaning to a place already ritually charged...
Pithouses and Placemaking on the Southern Colorado Plateau (2015)
Pithouse period settlement on the southern Colorado Plateau was the subject of vibrant research in the mid-twentieth century as Southwest archaeologists explored the validity of the Mogollon and Anasazi archaeological culture areas. In subsequent years the region became a laboratory for anthropology, as the rich data lent itself to studies of population dynamics in the famously heady days of New Archaeology. Since the mid-1970s, research on these first millennium A.D. sites has been confined to...
Pondering Prehistory, Texts, and Roads in Yucatan (2016)
Roads in Yucatan, Mexico, were aesthetic, territorial, and communicative systems that both united and divided the landscape. I employ network theory, placemaking, and urban planning and landscape models to analyze Maya road systems at Yaxuna, Coba, Ek Balam, and Chichen Itza as site extensions, markers of identity, and ritual and commercial corridors. It may seem heretical for an art historian to abandon historical documents available for one’s arsenal for analysis. However, Gil Stein and others...
Power, Placemaking, and the Production of Sacred and Political Landscapes at La Milpa North, Northwestern Belize (2016)
Although ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources offer insights into the practices of producing political and sacred landscapes among contemporary and colonial era Maya, the scarcity and separation in time and space of written sources from most Classic period contexts complicates the examination of placemaking strategies in more ancient settings. In the near absence of written sources, landscapes, which are inscribed by built environments and the material remains of inhabitation, may be read as...
Seneca Village: The Making and Un-making of a Distinctive 19th-Century Place on the Periphery of New York City (2018)
In the late 1820s and in the shadow of emancipation in New York State, several African Americans purchased land in what is now Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Pushed by racial oppression and unsanitary conditions downtown and pulled by the prospects of a healthier, freer life and property ownership, they were joined by other members of the African diaspora and built an important Black middle-class community, likely active in the abolitionist movement. The city removed the villagers from their land...