Urbanism (Other Keyword)
201-225 (251 Records)
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...
Teotihuacan Sound Mapping: Exploring the Sonic Sphere of the City of the Gods (2021)
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...
Terrain Adjustment and Prehistoric Communities. In: Man, Settlement and Urbanism (1972)
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A Thousand Years after the Volcano Erupted: TBJ Deposits and Use at Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (2016)
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...
Three Tropical Thoughts: Vern Scarborough and the Migration to Tropical Ecology (2016)
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...
Toward a Multispecies Perspective on Human-Animal Networks in Early Urban Societies of Upper Mesopotamia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades before anthropologists advocated for multispecies anthropology and ethnography, Richard Redding was charting a new path for a multispecies approach to anthropological archaeology. His research reveals an implicit awareness of the complexity of human-animal relationships that is a hallmark of...
Towards 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) (2019)
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,...
Towns under the Microscope: Revising Historical Narratives on the Development of Medieval Towns and their Markets in Northwestern Europe (2019)
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...
Trypillia Mega-site Networks: Understanding the Centrality of the Largest Settlement in Fourth-Millennium BC Europe (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 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...
Understanding Infrastructural Power, Collective Action, and Urban Form: Situating Neighborhoods and Districts at Caracol, Belize (2018)
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....
Unearthing Complex Urban Landscapes in Colonial Australia: The Parramatta Light Rail Project (2023)
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,...
Urban Construction as a Social Transformation Process (2016)
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...
Urban Form and Social Dimension 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. 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,...
Urban Ideologies and Demographic Revolutions in Ancient Mesopotamia (2021)
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...
Urban Landscapes in Late Postclassic Western Mesoamerica: A View from Angamuco, Michoacán (2019)
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)...
Urban Life Histories, Long-Term Angkorian Urbanism, and the Kok Phnov Site (2021)
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...
Urban Life in the Distant Past: A New Approach to Early Urbanism (2023)
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...
Urban Network Resilience and Fragility (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. Residential densities within the settlements of sedentary communities vary between about 1,000 p/ha and less than 10 p/ha. Some regional settlement networks consist predominantly of settlements with compact, high-density residence patterns while others are dominated by settlements with dispersed, low-density residence patterns....
Urban Networks in Early Iron Age Europe: Nucleation and Dispersal (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. Urbanization is a social process, rather than a final destination. More important than debating whether one specific settlement within a system should be classified as "urban," "proto-urban," or "nonurban" is to analyze the wider processes of settlement nucleation and centralization that take place within the larger landscape,...
Urban Palimpsest Landscapes: Interpreting the Teotihuacan LiDAR map (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With 54% of the world’s population living in urban zones, investigating the nature and impact of urban centers has never been more relevant. Archaeology’s unique ability to reconstruct prehistoric urban systems across the long dureé makes the Pre-Columbian metropolis of...
Urban Planning and Access to Water in Pompeii (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The process of urbanization and urban planning plays an important role in understanding how people utilize their space to access resources. Pompeii’s water system includes a combination of household water collection features, primarily cisterns. However, an aqueduct system was installed in the first century AD providing new access to water leading to a variety...
Urban Political Systems in the Huaxtec Region: Large-Scale Settlements and Royal Sculpture (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. In this presentation we explore political arrangements, settlement organization, and urban dwelling in northern Veracruz during the Postclassic Period. We use the spatial distribution of royal Huastec sculpture, and its placement within the sites. We aim to address Huastec cities and urbanism at the local level.
Urban Reworking as Political Action at the Ancient Maya City of Actuncan, Belize (2018)
This paper begins with a question: What does it mean to live amongst ruins? The literature on ancient Maya urbanism focuses to a large extent on how urban spaces are arranged and what this says about social and political organization. However, the long occupations of many Maya centers resulted in urban centers that reflect a palimpsest of decision-making over centuries rather than a single grand plan. Indeed, evidence at many Maya sites suggests that urban plans were reworked as buildings were...
Urban Spatial Relationships during the Early Islamic Period: Reassessing Investigations into the Market and Mosque at Sīrāf, Iran (2018)
There has been much debate on what defines an Islamic city (madīna) and what made cities become "Islamic" after the Islamic conquest. These studies have often marginalized the Islamic period, associating street encroachment and overall shifts away from the "classical" model as signs of decline. Scholars have relied on western notions of what defines a city and have used strict urban typological models, which do not conform to the region or period. In addition, these studies have neglected to...
Urbanism and Domestic Life in the Tlajinga District, Teotihuacan: New Research (2016)
Teotihuacan’s Tlajinga district comprises a cluster of neighborhoods of primarily common status apartment compounds, covering approximately 1km2 in the south of the city. Previous investigations at one of them, 33:S3W1 or “Tlajinga 33,” provided valuable information concerning daily life in the urban periphery. The Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) has thus far involved excavations at two other compounds (designated 17:S3E1 and 18:S3E1) and along the southern extension of the...