Urbanism (Other Keyword)
151-175 (285 Records)
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)
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)
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)
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...
Marshlands and Early Mesopotamian Urban Form (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and...
Maya Inequality at Caracol, Belize: District-Level Urban Analysis within a Garden City (2019)
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)
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.
Measuring Urban Mobility and Accessibility in a Mesoamerican Context (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While spatial analysis has become commonplace in archaeology, the social implications of mobility and accessibility in urban contexts remain an aspect that can be studied in much more depth. Drawing theories and methodologies from urban design has long been a staple for understanding the lived built environment, and...
Mesopotamian Megasites before Uruk (2017)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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...
Modeling Oral Health in the Loretto Bioarchaeology Project (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries generated significant developments in dentistry as the field professionalized and new treatments and care regimes were promoted across the US. However, the extent to which the public engaged with these developments is less well-known. This project examines changes in dental health and care over...
Modern-World Archaeology at Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (2019)
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...
Mortuary Culture of the Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery (2025)
This is an abstract from the "City and Country in the American West:Post-1848 Historical Archaeologies of Denver and Los Angeles" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Agua Mansa is a historic ranchero settlement in the San Bernardino valley, established in 1845 by migrants from Abiquiu, New Mexico, on land surrounding the former Mission San Gabriel. The Agua Mansa Pioneer Cemetery was one of few surviving structures following a flood in...
Narratives of Rise and Collapse: Fragile Urbanism in Early Iron Age Europe (2019)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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...
Olive Oil and Urbanism: Specialized Production in late 4th millennium South-West Asia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Early Bronze Age (3800 – 2000 BCE) southern Levantine agricultural infrastructure developed on a region-wide scale to facilitate the accumulation of surpluses in the newly emerging urban landscape. Olive oil grew to be an important staple and luxury product. This discussion focuses on an EB IB (3300-3050 BCE) olive oil production site in...
Overcoming Centralization in the Ancient Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: Toward a Novel Model of Indigenous Low-Density Urbanism in Northern Colombia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper develops a novel model to understand the social organization of landscapes and urban settlements in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This region's history mainly stems from the imposition of European categories to interpret the sociopolitical organization of...