Built Environment (Other Keyword)
1-24 (24 Records)
Researchers in a number of fields have come to recognize the vital importance of the built environment not only as material culture, but as symbolic expressions of the larger cultural framework through which social relations are produced and reproduced. Over the last half-century, studies have demonstrated how architectural characteristics—such as building size, shape, and the presence of various architectural materials, features, and furnishings—have a direct influence on human behavior and...
The build environment on Late Postclassic terraces in Tlaxcallan (2016)
During intensive survey and mapping of the Late Postclassic City of Tlaxcallan, we noted that the inhabitants of the ancient city of Tlaxcallan, in Tlaxcala, Mexico, developed a dense settlement pattern and complex urban landscape during the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1250-1521). Specifically, massive terraces and open and accessible plazas dominated this landscape. In this paper, we present the initial results of excavations on a series of terraces located at the northern edge of the city. This...
Building a Plantation: Architecture, the Built Environment, and Living Spaces at Bacon’s Castle, Surry County, Virginia (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Archaeology/Architecture", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In North America, recent-historical archaeology and architectural history tend to occupy separate spheres compared to, for instance, buildings archaeology in the UK. Partial exceptions include places like the Chesapeake, where the two disciplines have shared roots at institutions like Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and St. Mary’s City. But at more...
The Built Environment of Cold War Era Servicewomen (Legacy 05-194)
This study examines the history and evolution of the built environment of Cold War era servicewomen to provide a historic context for use in identifying and evaluating aspects of historic buildings, landscapes, and properties associated with Cold War Era servicewomen that may be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
The Built Environment of Cold War Era Servicewomen - Report (Legacy 05-194) (2006)
This study examines the history and evolution of the built environment of Cold War era servicewomen to provide a historic context for use in identifying and evaluating aspects of historic buildings, landscapes, and properties associated with Cold War Era servicewomen that may be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
Classic Maya Politics and the Spirit of Place: Controlling Architectural Discourse at Uxul, Campeche, Mexico (2017)
Settlements are both product and site of innumerable, multi-layered, and constantly changing interactions between humans and the material world. At any given moment, the quintessence of a place reflects the prevailing meanings that are associated with it. In this sense, quintessence is inextricably linked to power—over discourse, material, and space. This talk explores the role played by political power in defining the character of the Classic Maya settlement of Uxul, Campeche, Mexico. After...
Continuity and Change in the Pisgah Built Environment (2016)
Previous studies of Mississippian towns and villages have extensively detailed the various elements of community organization and built environment that reflect the incorporation of widely shared Mississippian ideas and beliefs. How these towns were built and rebuilt over time demonstrates how regional processes of expansion and integration played out at the presumed edge of the Mississippian world. This paper examines the evolving built environment during the Pisgah period in western North...
Cultural Resources of the Unincorporated Portions of Hillsborough County: An Inventory of the Built Environment (1980)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Enriched Spatial Syntax Analysis of Two Late Postclassic Terraces in Tlaxcallan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The work studies, from a human ecology perspective, the process of adapting the environment to the needs of the pre-Hispanic population of Tlaxcallan during the period of 1250-1519 A.D. It is proposed that the construction of the environment is the result of the interaction among ecological, historical, political, economic and symbolic factors...
From Chinese Exclusion (1882) to Chinese Revolution (1911): The Archaeology of Resiliency in Transpacific Communities (2020)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Arming the Resistance: Recent Scholarship in Chinese Diaspora Archaeology" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Historical archaeologists are increasingly using transnational approaches to understand diasporas, particularly because migrants are affected by social and political events in both their homeland and their diasporic community. My paper examines Chinese migration to the U.S. and the development of...
Housing and Living areas of the Enslaved and Free Servants at the Magens House Compound, St. Thomas (2016)
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the enslaved represented sixty-two percent of the urban population on the island of St Thomas in the Danish West Indies. While St. Thomas never held slave populations comparable to the other colonial empires in the Caribbean, it was an extremely important transshipment hub for the Caribbean and beyond. Slavery within the urban port setting of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas differed radically from the rural plantations, presenting the enslaved within the...
Introduction: Experiencing urban transition and change (2013)
Historical archaeologists benefit from (or are overwhelmed by) closer chronological resolution and availability of varying sources than those studying other periods, inviting alternative approaches to interpretation. As an introduction to the session, this paper will provide a brief overview of archaeological thought on the subject of micro-scales, fine-grained research, and biographical approaches to the relatively recent past. In the context of the session theme, the paper will make reference...
Material as Behavior: The Role of Generative Information Mechanisms in Restricting and Aiding in Settlement Dynamics (2016)
Archaeologists have long argued that the built environment is an expression of prehistoric community organizations, social interactions, and changes through time. Traditionally, archaeologists have interpreted buildings and settlement landscapes as proxies for estimating population size; indices of power structures; representations of community organization; markers of social interactions; etc. Even though there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of architecture it has been...
The New Normal: Seeking Household Experiences of Inter-war Public Housing (2017)
The 1920s and 1930s saw the renewal of large parts of Britain’s housing stock. In Birmingham, England, new housing projects were constructed in the suburbs, each home having three bedrooms, bathroom, indoor lavatory, garden, and local amenities – a contrast to the back-to-back housing in the centre of Birmingham that new suburban homes sought to replace. The back-to-backs were seen as crowded and insanitary, children sharing bedrooms with adults and non-family lodgers. The form and fabric of new...
Ordering Buildings, Building Order: Place Production in a Planned Colonial Town in Highland Peru (2015)
In the 1570s, the Viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo instituted one of the largest forced resettlement programs in world history: the Reducción General de Indios (General Resettlement of Indians). Some 1.4 million native Andeans were forcibly resettled into over 1,000 planned colonial reducción ("reduction") towns built on gridded street plans throughout the viceroyalty. Through the media of the built environment, the Reducción was to be a means of generating a new social order from the ground...
Painting Ourselves out of a Corner: Considerations on the Medium (2015)
While the connections between ancient mural paintings and twentieth-century urban mural programs may seem tenuous, certain technical, structural, and physical considerations of the medium itself link exemplars from past and present. The inextricable relationship between murals and their architectural supports as well as its scale can compel a different type of viewing and visceral engagement than other types of two-dimensional media; it forces a relatedness that must be unpacked. In this paper,...
Parochialism the Eldonian Way: Maintaining Local Ties and Manifestations of ‘Home’. (2016)
Mark Crinson writes of the city as a physical landscape and a collection of objects and practices that both enable recollections of the past, and embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding. The homes of the people of Vauxhall, an inner-city district of Liverpool, were demolished and rebuilt in successive waves of ‘slum’ clearance during the 20th century, the latest manifestation of the area’s working-class housing being shaped by residents themselves – a...
Political Process, Polity Formation, and the Role of Urban Centers in Inner Asia (2017)
By 200 B.C.E. the eastern steppe regions of Inner Asia saw the development of expansive and complex political systems usually referred to as empires. The origins of these polities and the processes of consolidation can be described within the concept of a political community, reflecting the actions of competing groups in expansive social network. For Inner Asia, community was linked to issues of mobility, dispersed control hierarchies, and the economics of multi-resource pastoralism. Together,...
Public or Private: Adaptations in the Use of Public Space During the Maya Late Classic Period (2015)
Are all open spaces public spaces? What factors influence how ‘public’ a space is? How did the population increase during the Late Classic period impact the use and design of open spaces in the Maya lowlands? To understand how the Maya adapted their built environment in response to high populations, I examine the architectural features of plazas and patios in a ritual-residential group at Xultun. In the Late Classic period, residents erected additional buildings within patios, reducing the...
Seeing Prehistory in Color: Interpreting the Use of Colored Pigments at the Tiwanaku Omo Temple, Moquegua, Peru (2015)
Although color is often at the background of our lived experience, colors also have the power to demand our attention. In this paper we explore how color was a meaningful component of the built environment in prehistoric South America and specifically the ways it demanded the attention of the Tiwanaku (AD 500-1100) of the south-central Andes. Extensive excavations at the Tiwanaku Omo ceremonial temple (M10A) in Moquegua, Peru have revealed the use of red and green pigments on selective walls...
Spatial Arrangements at Chichen Itza (2016)
Site mapping has been a mainstay in the study of archaeological cultures. Following upon the heels of mapping efforts, which have grown increasingly precise as our own technology develops, scholars have studied site, building, and monument orientations to great effect. In the Maya region such investigations have shown how the Maya positioned themselves relative to the cardinal and inter-cardinal directions, natural aspects of the landscape, and/or other parts of the built environment at inter-...
The view from above: changing experiences of the built environment during the Andean Late Intermediate Period (2016)
The highland Andes underwent major transformations in settlement organization between AD1000-1300, in the first half of the Late Intermediate Period. Settlement patterning shifted to higher altitudes, and in some areas, new sites were accompanied by defensive features. Most research has focused on the structural pressures that led to these changes, such as an increase of violence in the wake of Middle Horizon polity collapse, or a shift to pastoralism as a result of climate change. This paper...
What Remains: Building Removal, Worker Retraining, and Toxic Materials in Detroit (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2017)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines how the destruction of built environments reconfigures economic and environmental inequalities in the postindustrial United States. It does so by investigating the demolition of vacant buildings in Detroit. Estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000, vacant buildings index decades of racially motivated population decline and deindustrialization. Such structures are...
Wind-Powered Sugar Mills as Constructions of Control in the Plantation Landscapes of Montserrat, West Indies (2017)
As James Delle recently argued, Caribbean plantation landscapes were built environments designed to mediate interactions between planters and enslaved labourers. In this paper, wind-powered sugar mills on the island of Montserrat are singled out as being prominent components of the plantation environment that were not only economically productive, but also served as markers of planter power and control. The mills’ distinctive shape and height renders them instantly identifiable, and their...