Urbanism (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Brunner.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Carballo.

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...

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

Greater Angkor (9-15th centuries CE) was mainland Southeast Asia’s largest low-density urban area. Some of the most visible aspects of this landscape are the large stone temples constructed by Angkorian kings and elites. While many scholars have hypothesized that these temple enclosures were loci of habitation, few have documented this archaeologically. In this paper, we present the results of two field seasons of excavation at the temple site of Ta Prohm, part of a broader research program that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius. Anna S. Cohen. Kyle R. Urquhart.

Despite over 70 years of research in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin of Michoacan, there has been limited work focusing on pre-Purepecha and Purepecha urbanism in the region. In this paper, we discuss how recent survey and excavation data from the ancient city of Angamuco (c. 250-1530 CE) is helping us to evaluate whether suggested urban models from different parts of Mesoamerica are applicable in western Mexico. Alternatively, is there evidence for a distinct type of west Mexican or Purepecha city?...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elissa Bullion. Farhad Maksudov. Michael Frachetti.

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 ninth to thirteenth centuries in the western Eurasian steppe and Central Asia were a period of intensive urban growth. Cities such as Bukhara and Marv boasted large populations in the hundreds of thousands, were home to large communities of scientific and religious scholars, and were transformed by large-scale construction, commonly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zlatko Karač. Vladimir Ukrainčik.

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 EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these 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 using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Phillip Parton. Geoffrey Clark.

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. The concept of low-density urbanization has been an important development in recognizing the diversity of past human settlements. However, the key challenge to studying low density urbanization with archaeological data, particularly in tropical zones, has been the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryun McConnell.

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. A multi-proxy artifactual, sedimentological, micromorphological, and geochemical investigation of soils collected from a community cistern (Denver, USA) elucidate its use-life regarding westward late nineteenth century Euro-American settlement and early twentieth century residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nick Simpson. Christopher T. Fisher.

Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Taylor Zaneri.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The origin of urbanism is one of the most significant transitions in human history. Archaeologists and historians have been interested in the origins and development of early medieval urbanism since the days of V. Gordon Childe and Henri Pirenne in the early twentieth century. While most of the early studies of medieval towns were based on historical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pam Crabtree. Douglas Campana.

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The development of urbanism in northwestern Europe has been of interest to medieval archaeologists and historians since the days of Henry Pirenne, and these questions have been central to anthropological archaeology throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the critical features of early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Helmer. David Chicoine.

This paper examines forms of proto-urban settlements in coastal Ancash, north-central Peru, centered on the Nepeña Valley. During the Early Horizon (800-100 BC), the region witnessed the development of culturally and economically interrelated settlements with varying degrees of architectural density and complexity. Most of these centers were organized around clusters of walled enclosures with duplicate domestic facilities interpreted as multi-functional residential complexes, or compounds....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Keller.

Formal plazas constitute the majority of public space in Maya centers and yet, until quite recently, plazas have not received the same investigative attention as the impressive pyramids and palaces that surround them. This neglect is largely due to the difficulty of investigating public plazas, which typically contain few artifactual or structural indications of their ancient use. Although the identification of activity in ancient plazas is technically challenging, a dedicated investigation of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only E. Christian Wells. Kara Fulton. David Mixter. Borislava Simova.

The archaeological investigation of Actuncan in western Belize included the geochemical analysis of one of the largest and most diverse sets of activity surfaces in the Maya world. Over 1200 soil, sediment, and plaster samples from four major architectural complexes representing regal, ritual, and residential locations were assayed using ICP-MS. The results allow a uniquely "atomic" perspective on the changing use of urban space over roughly 900 years, ca. AD 100-1000. This research identifies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah J. M. May.

Schools are a key component of urbanism, places where the regulatory apparatus of the state reaches into the lives of families. High density, busy, with ever shifting power politics creating spaces of fear and safety; creativity and control. In many ways they are hyper-urban. The establishment of Board Schools at the end of the 19th century in Britain coincides with the expansion of coastal cites such as Portsmouth. Throughout the 20th century ideology has been explicitly and publicly expressed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Hare.

I present a preliminary analysis of movement through the Postclassic political capital of Mayapán. The architectural features at Mayapán are some of the most densely concentrated of sites in ancient Mesoamerica, but its organizational principles defy explanation. Almost two decades of fieldwork, including using electronic total stations, RTK survey-grade GNSS, UAV-based aerial photography, and an aircraft-borne LiDAR survey of a 40 sq km area centered on Mayapán's defensive wall, allows mapping...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lance Pursey.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology of Medieval Eurasian Steppe Urbanism" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the course of its 200+ year tenure the Kitan-Liao dynasty (907–1125) saw large migrations, intensification of settlements, and widespread construction of walled sites of varying sizes north of the Great Wall (N41°+) across the grassland ecotones of North Asia. The remains of some 650 such walled sites are distributed across Inner...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Torras Freixa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan is not a “lost or abandoned city” it is a resilient settlement with a long human occupation to the present-day. Therefore, rather than looking for the reasons behind the collapse of the Classic city of Teotihuacan, the main goal of this contribution is to explore the ancient city of Teotihuacan by itself after this major event. In sum, our aim...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chelsea Fisher.

Like many other sites in the northern Maya lowlands, Yaxuná and its environs incorporate a number of cenotes (natural pits in the limestone bedrock that expose underlying groundwater) into the built environment. Interestingly, all but one of these permanent water sources lie beyond the limits of the site’s public and residential core. Residents of the ancient city compensated for this, at least on a seasonal basis, by constructing an aguada (a natural, or in this case human-modified, pond) in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Kolb.

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 City of Denver originated as a gold-mining town. Its geographic location and semi-arid environment posed unique challenges to the development of its water supply infrastructure. Multi-scalar historical and archeological analyses, reveal how the city coped with the challenges of water...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicola Terrenato.

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. The urbanization of western central Italy has had a peculiar role in our intellectual history, starting with its most famous fruit, the "eternal" city of Rome. With evident teleology, the narrative about the emergence of the earliest agglomerations in the early first millennium BCE has taken the form of an ascending...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Wattenmaker.

Stratified occupational remains at mounded sites of third millennium Mesopotamia afford a temporal perspective on houses and institutions, as well as fluctuations in their resources. This paper draws on such data to evaluate the ways that houses and institutions accrued wealth and enhanced inequalities. Evidence for the production, circulation and storage of food and craft goods in early Mesopotamia informs about the kinds of resources used for wealth building, the processes through which goods...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brittany Fullen.

Excavations at the Middle Horizon (AD 500-100) capital city of Huari in the summer of 2017 focused on understanding processes of urbanization and the resulting realities of everyday life in the domestic sector of Patipampa. Several of the architectural spaces exposed during excavation were more intensively investigated. This paper focuses on the architectural space containing niched walls in order to understand how the Wari utilized this type of space in comparison to the uses of the other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kate Trusler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The location of sanitation facilities has important social and cultural ramification about the use latrines and management of waste in the ancient Mediterranean. Field work in Pompeii has led to a more precise understanding of residential and business latrines and downpipes (indicators of upper story sanitation features) by challenging commonly held...