Urbanism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Whittington.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chiyo Cahnu, a Mixtec mountaintop capital, is unusual in relation to the archaeology of Oaxaca because it is larger than normal for Postclassic settlements and apparently was inhabited for a short length of time. Mapping a one square kilometer area of the capital using powerful GPS devices between 2013 and 2017 revealed about 370 building sites, almost 2,400...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shawn Morton. Meaghan Peuramaki-Brown.

In a 2012 article exploring the spatial structure of post-Tlamimilolpa phase Teotihuacan, Mexico, we invoked both a materialist body of method-theory known as space syntax and an interactional theory of community development. Through this framework, we discussed community structure and systems of authority expressed by the architectural masses and spaces of the city. In this paper, the authors revisit this approach, with fresh eyes and in the context of our growing knowledge of ancient urbanism....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Forste. Deirdre Fulton.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient city of Ashkelon was a major economic port in the Near East during the Early Islamic period (ca. 636–1200 CE). Located on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Israel, it was a cosmopolitan city, an administrative center, and a stronghold in the coastal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Søren Sindbæk.

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. Maritime trading emporia were nodal points of social networks and economic interactions in Viking-age Scandinavia. Despite their social centrality, archaeology shows that such places were rather small, unassuming, and sometimes short-lived settlement. This contrasts with a wealth of evidence pointing to communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Veronica Perez Rodriguez.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Researchers that study pre-Hispanic urbanism in the Mixteca Alta often remark that the region today is eroded and sparsely populated. Places that in the past supported urban populations in the tens of thousands today seem to struggle to sustain a few hundred. Some have called this the Mixtec paradox. Research on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Price.

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Livestock are widely recognized as fundamental features of the political economies of ancient Near Eastern states. Animals served as “wealth on the hoof,” the strategic resources of urban institutions seeking to expand aspects of the subsistence economic to finance...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benno Fiehring. Hans Martz de la Vega.

With only scarce information on the topic, we have undertaken an archaeoastronomical investigation in Tamtoc, because we consider that the relations between its architecture and phenomena in the sky constituted an important element for the harmonic integration of it’s urban space, which probably supported oral discourse in the past. The measurement of the building’s orientation in relation to the local horizon, allows us to know the specific calendric dates at which the sun aligns with the axis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tomás Gallareta Cervera. Brett A. Houk.

Research on ancient Maya cities is generally modeled after large sites with massive architecture, dynastic burials, and written records documenting the activities of divine rulers. However, the development of these cities is the exception, rather than the norm, since the majority of Maya sites did not reach such enormous proportions, yet many of them likely qualified as cities from a functional standpoint. Hence, a research on non-massive cities, "from the bottom up," is crucial to understand...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerald Ek.

This is an abstract from the "A Session in Memory of William J. Folan: Cities, Settlement, and Climate" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over his distinguished career William Folan made a substantive contribution to knowledge of the scale, form, and nature of Maya urbanism. Classic Maya cities are often classified as a low-density agrarian-based urban tradition, a cross-cultural concept characterized by expansive settlement zones, lack of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael E. Smith.

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. Recent research suggests that temporary aggregation sites were more common in the past than many traditional models would predict. Why have scholars failed to recognize these sites? Why do they seem so strange? Beyond the development of more refined methods of settlement analysis, a major reason is a pervasive conflation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adje Both.

This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Teotihuacan Sound Mapping Project explores the role that sound and music played in the ancient urban environment of the site. The sound tools and musical instruments of Teotihuacan are re-created and played in different architectural settings, and the instrumental and architectural acoustics subsequently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Donald A. Davidson.

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DOCUMENT Citation Only William Fowler. Raquel López Rodríguez.

The impact of the eruption of Ilopango Volcano in the early sixth century A.D. has been a focus of Payson Sheets' research for more than four decades. The signature of this eruption is the distinctive "tierra blanca joven" (TBJ) layer found at sites in central and western El Salvador. Our excavations in 2013-15 at Ciudad Vieja, the archaeological remains of the Conquest-period town of San Salvador, have allowed us to identify a hitherto unknown site in the distribution of TBJ tephra. In some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Gunn.

Vern’s collaborative research fosters a number of insights both across investigators and disciplines. My top-three picks are tropical ecology, water cities, and Gulf Coast origin of Lowlands occupation. (1) Vern focuses on understanding implications of tropical ecology, central to which is high diversity and therefore low density. Working through the implications of this for human settlements has perhaps been his most important accomplishment. (2) Maya water cities are obvious attempts to break...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone. Pyiet Phyo Kyaw. Scott Macrae.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The IRAW@Bagan project is striving to generate an integrated socio-ecological history for residential patterning, agricultural practices, and water management at the Classical Burmese (Bama) capital of Bagan, Myanmar (11th to 14th centuries CE) across a range of significant ecological, climatic, economic,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dries Tys. Barbora Wouters.

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The central markets of medieval towns in Northwestern Europe, and more specifically the Low Countries, are considered to be the theatres of late medieval urban identity. They are often associated with the origins of these towns, or at least their glory as merchant towns in the past. In reality, these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marco Nebbia.

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 emergence of the largest settlements in fourth-millennium BC Europe triggered a number of questions regarding their proto- or even "fully urban" nature. For a long time scholars have been debating on this matter, focusing attention on the intrasite features of Trypillia mega-sites, thus overseeing the implication of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adrian Chase.

Ancient Maya cities possessed a unique urban form characterized by two factors: mixed agricultural land use within residential areas and dispersed households consisting of extended family groups. These two factors contributed to the low-density nature of Maya cities, and conditioned urban form and the structure of neighborhoods and districts. The requirements of top-down administration resulted in the creation of districts to delineate areas of provisioning for the city’s urban services....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Penny Crook. Abi Cryerhall. Eleanor C. Casella.

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. In 2020, a series of excavations by Sydney-based consultants GML Heritage followed the route of a new light railway system cutting its way through Parramatta: the second oldest city in British-occupied Australia. These works revealed a series of sites comprising military barracks, a commercial wharf,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liye Xie.

Archaeological evidence and ancient Chinese text imply that the construction of early urban settlements in China were planned events initiated by rulers relocating their settlements in order to legitimize their arising power and establish hierarchical social systems. Accordingly, the construction of the urban settlements may have been the transformative social environments in which power was legitimized and enacted and new social structure was created. I hypothesize that whether this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arianna Campiani.

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. In this paper I will explore the extent of planning and its social dimension at the ancient Maya city of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. Between the seventh and ninth centuries, during the Classic period, the plateau where Palenque is located was extensively modified resulting in a prosperous,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dramatic demographic growth is a hallmark of the urban process, yet reasons for population growth in emerging urban systems are not well understood. This paper draws on archaeological and textual evidence pertaining to ideology of the house and cultural values to explore why populations increased so dramatically in third millennium Mesopotamia. Additional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Cristóbal de Olid arrived in Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán c. 1522 CE, he encountered the powerful king (irecha) of the Purépecha (Tarascan) Empire who controlled approximately 75,000 km2 of western and central western Mesoamerica. Never defeated by the Mexica, the Late Postclassic (1350-1530 CE)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piphal Heng. Miriam Stark. Alison Carter. Rachna Chhay.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Angkor was premodern Southeast Asia’s largest city from the ninth to fifteenth century. Centered in northwest Cambodia near the Tonle Sap Lake, this agro-urban agglomeration comprises extensive settlements linked through a series of road and water management systems. Research on Angkorian urbanism has focused on either...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Smith.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I describe a new approach to understanding life and social dynamics in premodern cities around the world. Early cities varied considerably in their political and economic organization and dynamics. My approach is transdisciplinary in scope, scientific in epistemology, and anchored in the urban literature of the social sciences. The central concept is...