Urbanism (Other Keyword)
76-100 (204 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Upper Mesopotamia the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1600 B.C.E.) marked the regrowth of cities following the decline or collapse of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Researchers question the degree of continuity in urban space across these periods and some have suggested that Middle Bronze Age cities were "hollow," containing relatively small built-up...
How to Describe Mongol Period Urbanism on the Mongolian Plateau (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paper will introduce and discuss a set of themes deemed crucial for the understanding of settlement practices on the Mongolian plateau during the time of the Mongol Empire. The past 20 years witnessed a burgeoning of research endeavors regarding Mongol period settlement sites. Mongolian, Japanese, Russian, German, and US...
A Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Urban Landscape in Prince Harbor, British, Columbia? (2016)
Urbanism is almost exclusively associated with agriculture, although hunter-gatherers sometimes have seasonal aggregations numbering in the thousands. This paper considers the evidence for an urban-like settlement on the northern Northwest Coast. By AD 1787, the villages of nine tribes of the Northern Tsimshian were concentrated a small area in Prince Rupert Harbour (PRH), British Columbia and had been so for centuries. Prior to ca. 1500 cal BP the Northern Tsimshian lived in villages of varying...
Hunting and Husbandry at the Ancient Mexican City, Teotihuacan (2021)
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. Mesoamerica is a unique example of a center of urban development that thrived in the absence of large domesticated animals. And, while turkeys and dogs have a long history of domestic production in Mesoamerica, at the metropolis of Teotihuacan, we lack clear evidence...
Impressions of an Early Urban Landscape: Interpreting a Bronze Age Ceramic Motif from ‘Amlah, Oman (2016)
This paper explores one prominent material correlate of an interconnected ancient Near Eastern world: a category of ceramic vessels termed incised greywares. Archaeological excavations have revealed a significant corpus of incised greyware vessels from across the mid-third millennium BC Near East; they are found in contexts as diverse as the ancient city of Susa to small, communal tombs across the Omani peninsula. The primary focus of this paper lies in investigating an assemblage of this...
Inequality, Urban Longevity, and Commoner Households at the Ancient Maya City of Aventura, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological studies of urbanism frequently seek to assess the factors which enable some cities to persist over the long-term while others fail after a few generations. This paper continues this line of inquiry by drawing on anthropological scholarship on inequality to examine the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and urban longevity. The paper...
An Inhabitant’s Perspective of Material Urban Structure at Chunchucmil (2018)
Maya urban archaeology is progressively addressing how to ‘people the past’, using data exploration techniques. The Chunchucmil map (Hutson and Magnoni 2017) offers an exemplary spatial data resource. Chunchucmil features here as a testing ground for showcasing the interpretive research advances enabled by Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. BLT Mapping resulted from establishing a common frame of reference to make radical comparisons between Maya and contemporary urban patterns. The anticipation...
An Integrated Heavy-Lift Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Remote Sensing Platform (2018)
We describe an integrated heavy-lift unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing platform used to map archaeological features under the forest canopy in the northern Yucatán. We collaborated with Mobile Recon Systems Inc. to construct a UAV-based aerial mapping system that can be used to create high-resolution maps and 3D models of archaeological ruins, excavations, caves, and cenotes for small to medium-sized areas of the forested environment. The system integrates Light Detection and...
Interpreting the Past: How Transdisciplinary Research Advances the Field of Maya Archaeology (2023)
This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human-nature relationships are key to understanding past societal developments. The value of conducting transdisciplinary research, involving new methods and other investigators, has become increasingly apparent as the field of Maya Studies has matured. While there has continued to be a significant increase in the...
Intra-urban Density and Spatial Variation at Ancient Teotihuacan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The architectural map produced by René Millon’s Teotihuacan Mapping Project allows a fine-grained investigation of two features poorly understood for ancient cities. First, we use a kernel density analysis of residential structures to assess the differential population densities of the city. We find that there...
Introducing Urbanism, Technology, and Identity: Celebrating the Comparative Archaeology of Rita P. Wright (2018)
In this talk, we introduce the papers of the session, which reflect the many threads of Rita P. Wright’s contributions to archaeology. Prof. Wright has established a suite of concepts and critiques that generate a comparative framework that is not restricted to a single geographical area. In her early work on ceramic production and craft, Wright synthesized the anthropology of technology with the archaeology of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, laying the foundation for a technological approach that...
Investigating Public Spaces at the Urban Center of Cerro Jazmín, Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The paper presents recently recovered information from excavations conducted in public spaces and open areas in the Late to Terminal Formative city of Cerro Jazmín in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca. An area thought to be a plaza located directly south to a three-mound complex (Tres Cerritos) revealed a series of constructions and...
Investigations of Peri-Urban Settlement and Domestic Reservoirs: Research from Yaxnohcah, Campeche, Mexico (2017)
Peri-urban zones of settlement are unique localities among the urban-rural continuum that form due to dispersed urban growth, creating hybrid landscapes of fragmented urban and rural characteristics. Within these zones, domestic-scale reservoirs that the ancient Maya modified and maintained to manage their seasonally-scarce water resources are an important component. This study focuses on processes of multiple nuclei urban development and associated peri-urban formation at the site of Yaxnohcah...
Ireta: An Ethnohistoric and Archaeological Model of P'urépecha Urban Polities (2018)
New archaeological research at the site of Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico demonstrates unequivocally that the P'urépecha (Tarascans) had cities that before the formation of the Late Postclassic empire. This paper will reexamine the ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence for the organizational structure of P'urépecha urban polities in light of the new archaeological evidence. The evidence presented here suggests a form of political organization superficially similar to the altepetl model of Nahua...
Is the Study of Ancient Money Really So Difficult? (2018)
The difficulty that many economists and anthropologists have with studying ancient money lies with inadequate understanding of modern monetary systems. I briefly review the establishment of two currencies: the British pound in the 18th century and the US dollar in the 19th and why the establishment both currencies were political (not economic) constructs. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists analyze the current fiat currencies as political constructs and David Graber’s Debt: The First 5000...
Kalas and Urbanism in Western Central Asia (2017)
Kalas (qalas), as iconic fortified enclosure sites, were nodes within dispersed and low-density settlement patterns of Central Asian oases. The largest kalas functioned as the equivalent of urban centers for mobile, agro-pastoral societies. A complex and diversified system of agro-pastoral subsistence and production strategies were employed within the oases in response to extreme climatic and environmental conditions. This paper will focus on the transition from the Late Antique to Early...
Karakorum, Mongolia, a complex urban site in a non-urban society (2017)
It is undisputed that Karakorum was founded by the Mongol Emperor/Khan, saying this means we analyze a top-down planned large city in a non-sedentary, non-urban society. Therefore we will address the question of the layout of the city and the spatial organization. How are activities and people ordered, is there common space, what kind of infrastructure is provided by the city founders and how is it maintained during the nearly 200 years of the existence of the city. At which areas were landmark...
K’anwitznal: Six Years of Cartography at the Site of Ucanal, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Building on the pioneer work of the Proyecto Atlas de Guatemala, the Proyecto Arqueológico Ucanal has considerably expanded the survey and excavations of the site leading to a better comprehension of the transition of the Late to Terminal Classic periods. The site has been surveyed with a combination of approaches including a traditional total station,...
The Land and Water Revisited Project (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1961, archaeologist William T. Sanders traveled to México’s Teotihuacan Valley to film a documentary based on his 1957 Harvard dissertation. The film, Land and Water: An Ecological Study of the Teotihuacan Valley of México, provides an invaluable snapshot of agricultural and land-use practices in the area just prior to the urban explosion of México City....
Late Antiquity Revealed: Assessing Urban Change at Roman Nedinum in Northern Dalmatia, Croatia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2015, the Nadin-Gradina Archaeological Project (NGAP) began as a collaborative effort between the University of Zadar and University of Maine to unravel the long-term record of urban change in the Ravni Kotari region of northern Dalmatia, with a primary focus on the Nadin-Gradina archaeological site. Since its inception, the NGAP has confirmed a 2,500-year...
Late-Terminal Classic Community Mobility and Migration at El Perú-Waka’ (2018)
Recent archaeology at the Classic Maya city of El Perú-Waka’ has revealed a number of distinct communities making up the urban occupation. These communities possess their own cycles of settlement, florescence, and abandonment. Taken together, these cycles seem to show two distinct aspects that directly pertain to Classic Maya urbanism. One, it shows the urban landscape to be in a continuously changing state. The urban ruins encountered by researchers are the end product of centuries of such...
Leaving the Blanks Unfilled: a case study in productive ambiguity from Early Bronze Age Lebanon (2017)
An oft-heard sentiment in prehistoric archaeology, particularly for contexts without traditionally visible indicators of gender (i.e., bodies or identifiable representations of bodies), is that "the evidence just isn’t there" to productively introduce intersectional gender research. This is partly due to the trend-sensitivity of archaeology, which often draws from other disciplines to supplement its own scope. Intersectionality is used in the same way, as archaeologists attempt to reframe their...
Lidar Mapping of a Zapotec City: Cultural Hybridity and Ethnogenesis in Postclassic Guiengola, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I will discuss how Zapotecs both continued and innovated the construction traditions from the central valleys of Oaxaca in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec by showing the results of the analysis of the lidar scan made during the 2022–2023 field season of the Guiengola Archaeological Project. The archaeological site of...
Lidar Reconnaissance of the Calakmul Urban Landscape (2023)
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. Building on the work of William J. Folan, the Bajo Laberinto Archaeological Project, initiated in 2022, is focused on investigations of urbanism centered on the city of Calakmul in southern Campeche. An initial 100 km2 lidar survey along the northern rim of the Bajo Laberinto has revealed large, elaborate...
Livelihoods and Opportunities: Household, Land Use and Landscape Change at Tikal (2018)
Sometimes described as a mosaic, regional land use and landscape in the Maya lowlands offer a unique opportunity to investigate the spatial and temporal dimensions and the socio-ecological dynamics of a variety of cultural systems, settlement patterns, and the environment. Unfortunately, the majority of urban theory applied to the lowlands focuses exclusively on urban authority and power for the provisioning of resources. Such approaches offer useful discussion and debate about the scale and...