Urbanism (Other Keyword)

101-125 (204 Records)

Living Landscapes of Night in Tiwanaku, Bolivia (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only John Janusek.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Most treatments of Andean urbanism and urban life emphasize the acts and rhythms of daily life. Ethnohistoric documentation of life in Cuzco, nevertheless, details a rich corpus of ritual sequences and domestic activities that ideally took place under cover of night. In Tiwanaku today, night is an ontological...


Long-Term Use of Local Clays in Potting Traditions during Early Urbanization in the Nochixtlán Valley of the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, Mexico, 500–100 BCE (2023)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Karleen Ronsairo.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mixteca Alta Ceramic Study (MACS) in the Nochixtlán Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, aims to understand how early urbanization in the valley impacted potters’ crafting techniques over time and space. Early urbanization in the valley spanned the Yucuita and Early Ramos ceramic phases (500–100 BCE) of the Middle to...


Low-Density Urbanism in the Classic Maya Lowlands: A View from El Perú-Waka’, Guatemala (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Marken.

As a key example of indigenous New World urbanism, the development, organization, and abandonment Classic Maya cities are subjects of great anthropological importance. Despite their comparative significance, for much of the twentieth century Classic Maya centers (ca. 250-950 C.E.) have been viewed by the public and many scholars as "non-cities," the capitals of complex polities, but lacking the residential density characteristic of fully urban places. Roland Fletcher has recently proposed that...


Low-Density, Dispersed Urbanism in the Tropical World: Some Global Implications (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

Though low-density, dispersed urbanism is conventionally understood as a feature only of modern industrial societies there was actually substantial low-density, dispersed urbanism in the agrarian world of Central America, Sri Lanka and SE Asia during the 1st and early 2nd millennia CE. These cities, such as Tikal, Anuradhapura and Angkor with areas between 200 and a 1000 sq km, substantially altered their natural environment and were dependent on massive infrastructure. They were then impacted...


Man in Prehistory (1975)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Chester S. Chard.

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.


The Map Results of an Integrated UAV-Based Remote Sensing Platform in the Northern Yucatán (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Sean Daugherty. Alexander Vermillion. Garrett Jones. Timothy Hare.

We report the results of testing a UAV-borne LiDAR and multispectral mapping system for archaeological mapping and modeling at the city of Mayapán, Mexico, located 40km south of modern Mérida. Mayapán was the largest Postclassic political capital and was one of the most densely nucleated of all Maya cities. The initial test is in an area adjacent to the south side of Mayapán’s monumental center. Previous research indicates the existence of a dense and complex system of residential and public...


Mapping and Spatial Analysis of an Ancient Mixtec Capital in Oaxaca (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington.

Chiyo Cahnu, a Mixtec mountaintop capital, is unusual in relation to the archaeology of Oaxaca. Mapping one square kilometer of the capital using powerful GPS devices between 2013 and 2017 revealed about 370 building sites, almost 2,400 agricultural and residential terraces, and ancient roads constructed on the steep slopes of Cerro Amole. The building sites range in complexity from single rooms to compounds with temples and dozens of rooms surrounding patios. The ball court is 45 meters long,...


Mapping the Ancient City of Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cobos.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A systematic mapping program conducted at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico, revealed a considerable amount of archaeological as well as non-archaeological features distributed over the surface of several areas located in the site’s periphery. This program relied upon the traditional mapping method consisting in clearing the...


Maya Inequality at Caracol, Belize: District-Level Urban Analysis within a Garden City (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2009 and 2013, LiDAR data collected for Caracol, Belize revealed the anthropogenic landscape of this Maya city. These data have advanced our understanding of water management, agriculture, markets, urbanism, and inequality at Caracol. Now with the analytical unit of the district – an urban administrative boundary of urban service provisioning within a city...


Mayan Urbanism: Impact On a Tropical Karst Environment (1979)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Deevey. D. Rice. P. Rice. H. Vaughan. M. Brenner. M. Flannery.

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.


Mesopotamian Megasites before Uruk (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

Discussions of "alternative" trajectories of urban growth are often compared to "classic" models from Old World civilizations, and most often Mesopotamia. It is said that Mesopotamian cities were dense and spatially discrete from their agricultural hinterlands, in contrast to new models of low-density urbanism. In fact, the earliest large settlement agglomerations ("megasites") in Mesopotamia were discontinuous and far less dense than the mature cities of the Bronze Age (after 3000 BC). This...


Microarchaeology and the Production of Urban Life at the Classic Maya City of Palenque (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Johnson. Felipe Trabanino. Eloi Berube. Eos Lopez.

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of urbanism typically include a consideration of scale, from the household, the neighborhood, ward, and city. These spatial scales are also spheres of interaction and have implications for the kinds of shared material practices we can expect to find archaeologically....


The Missing Big Picture: Settlement Size and Patterns in Western Mainland Southeast Asia during the First Millennium CE (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Phacharaphorn Phanomvan.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How were cities distributed in Mainland Southeast Asia in the past? What were the population estimates and patterns in the cities? Answering these questions leads to an understanding of long-term urbanization patterns, and the historical legacies associated with the geographical effects on development. However, to date, there is...


Mobility and Highland Medieval Urbanism of the Nomadic Qarakhanids (9th-11th c. CE, Uzbekistan) (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Merkle. Michael Frachetti.

This is an abstract from the "From Campsite to Capital – Mobility Patterns and Urbanism in Inner Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent discoveries of a series of highland urban sites (located over 2000m elevation) in the Pamir foothills of Uzbekistan inspire a full reconsideration of the political and economic organization of the Qarakhanid Khaganate and their relationship to both lowland and highland cities. The Qarakhanids controlled...


A Model for Urbanism from the Neotropics? (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Isendahl. Elizabeth Graham.

Drawing from our own research on food, water, and waste management, we describe the development and characteristics of settled life in the humid neotropics with a view to isolating features or patterns that reflect sustainable trajectories. Because mainstream concepts of “the city” tend to be structured by urban experiences that lie outside the tropics and are recentist in outlook, we suggest that there are urban (and peri-urban) phenomena in the deep past of the neotropics that tend to be...


Modern-World Archaeology at Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only William R. Fowler.

This is an abstract from the "The Transformation of Historical Archaeology: Papers in Honor of Charles E Orser, Jr" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Founded in 1525, rapidly abandoned, and refounded in 1528, the first villa of San Salvador had a resident indigenous population many times greater than its Spanish population. Abandoned 1545-60, its brief occupation spans the crucial years of the Conquest period in Central America. The well-preserved...


Narratives of Rise and Collapse: Fragile Urbanism in Early Iron Age Europe (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

This is an abstract from the "Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While traditional research on early urbanism has focused predominantly on ‘successful cities’, i.e. urban settlements that show long settlement histories, recently scholarship has also started to pay increasing attention to cases of short-lived agglomerations which only lasted for some decades or generations. In this...


Neighborhoods and the Constitution of Authority (2018)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Jacob Welch. Scott Hutson.

Archaeologists working on the question of integration of neighborhoods within cities or polities often begin by assuming the existence of centralized authority. Next, they move to consider the relationship between neighborhoods and such authorities. Researchers typically see this relationship as one of domination, independence, or something in between. The case of Chunchucmil, a large Maya site located in northwest Yucatan, Mexico, challenges this common approach to neighborhood integration. At...


Never Built in a Day: Contextualizing Urbanism in Iron Age Western Sicily (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Kolb. William Balco.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iron Age was a transformative period in western Sicily, introducing the indigenous Elymian populations to Aegean and Levantine colonists who brought their own languages, crops, technology, materials, social customs, and ritual systems. Concomitant to the arrival of these foreigners was a transformation of indigenous lifeways. We examine this transformation...


New Discoveries in the Izapa "Protoclassic" and Early Classic Periods (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendelsohn.

Izapa is best known as a Formative period (850-50 BC) monumental center with elaborately carved monuments. The site is also known for its Late Classic period monumental construction in Group F, at the northern end of the site. Considerably less attention has been paid to the transitional Terminal Formative or "Protoclassic" period Hato and Itstapa phases (50 BC-AD 250), as well as the Early Classic period Jaritas phase (AD 250-400), which bridge the temporal gap between these two centers. This...


Night and Darkness in Chaco Canyon (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chaco Canyon, an ancient monumental center in the Four Corners (ca. AD 800-1200), has long been a locus of charged nighttime activity. Visitors today are awed by the clear, dark, and vast night skies, and archaeoastronomical research at Chaco has revealed an extensive settlement design reflecting celestial...


Night Falls on Tenochtitlan (2019)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Toby Evans.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cortes escaped from Tenochtitlan on "La Noche Triste" in the summer of 1520, but many in his entourage did not – a Mexican woman awake in the night saw them heading across the causeway to the mainland and roused the city to pursue them. The intruders had been under siege by the Tenochca, whose daytime prowess as...


Nomadic Cities and Network Modularity: Scalar Analysis in Ancient Urbanism and Social Connectivity (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Farhad Maksudov.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discovery of small to mid-sized cities (Tashbulak and Tugunbulak) built by the Qarakhanids (ninth–twelfth century CE) at high elevation illustrates that urban centers used by nomadic khanates may have operated under a unique model of “modular” urbanism, which we define as a hybridized form of urban development and nomadic...


The Palace of Xalla at Teotihuacan: An Overview of a Multifunctional Palace (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda R. Manzanilla.

This is an abstract from the "The Palace of Xalla in Teotihuacan: A Possible Seat of Power in the Ancient Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The palace of Xalla is located between the pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. It is a 55,000 m2 palatial complex with plazas, structures, rooms, porticoes, and patios, surrounded by a double wall for patrol walk. It has been excavated extensively by Linda R. Manzanilla and her team from 2000 to 2020,...


Palaces at La Joya, Classic Period Central Veracruz: Architectural and Ideological Evidence (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Annick J. E. Daneels.

La Joya was the capital of a very small state during the 1st millennium AD in South Central Veracruz. This region is rarely associated with major political power, though obviously it was of high prestige in the Mesoamerican world in terms of the distribution of the paraphernalia associated with the ballgame ritual. Two contemporary monumental platforms at the site can be interpreted as palaces, with administrative, residential, ritual, and service areas, one possibly housing a political and the...