Theorizing and Excavating Neighborhoods

DOCUMENT Citation Only April Kamp-Whittaker. Bonnie J. Clark.

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers and designed to house around 10,000 individuals, these centers followed a rigid, gridded layout that allowed for the rapid construction of what were ostensibly cities. Residential sections were laid out in blocks, each containing twelve "apartment" buildings to which internees were assigned on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alleen Betzenhauser. Timothy Pauketat.

American Indian neighborhoods were very much under construction during the late-eleventh century at Cahokia. A social order that transcends pre-Mississippian village life may now be defined based on large-scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia proper. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious if not political or ethnic divisions that did not form organically. The central problems of a Mississippian analysis,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ricardo Antorcha Pedemonte. Lane F. Fargher. Richard E. Blanton.

Collective Action Theory posits that states are the outcome of bargaining among the individuals, groups, and factions that make up the political community. Thus, the nature of intermediate scale socio-spatial units or social organizations that exist hierarchically between individual households and the state (e.g., corporate groups, clans, neighborhoods, communities, patron-client networks, etc.) plays a key role in determining the political-economic strategies employed by the architects of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliana Novic.

The degree to which the residents of neighborhoods form integrated communities with uniform social, political, and economic conditions is highly variable. I define neighborhoods, in agreement with most earlier definitions, as based on place and presence in an urbanized environment. The forms and functions of neighborhoods, and their relationships to larger socio-political urban processes, is not well understood for preindustrial societies. Are neighborhoods fully integrated communities or are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Lehner.

A twenty hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that began with the building of the Pyramids at the low southeastern base of the Giza Plateau shows distinct components that must have functioned as neighborhoods in the sense of geographically localized social networks within the larger conurbation. Correlation between architectural patterns and builders’ graffiti with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Flanking the major Nile port of its time, community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Pacifico. Lise Truex.

Dr. Pacifico and Dr. Truex provide opening reflections and orienting comments regarding the diverse perspectives and case studies presented in this symposium on excavating and theorizing neighborhoods. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Santiago Juarez.

In many societies around the world, the concept of community plays a central role in the formation of individual identities. Communities are subject to change and the focus on community identity provides a theoretical approach in which the individual can be situated in a broader sphere of social interaction. I research community through spatial analyses of human constructions at the Preclassic site of Noh K'uh in Chiapas, Mexico. My findings revealed that house-mounds clustered on hill-tops...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Swenson.

Anthropologists have argued that early urban neighborhoods were equivalent to small villages that maintained kinship relations and economic dependencies characteristic of the rural sphere. Other scholars have noted that different urban centers (including in Mesoamerica, Angkor, and New Kingdom Egypt) were similarly configured as "sociograms" of larger territorial and ethnic boundaries. The political landscape of the North Coast of Peru offers important comparative data by which to assess the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Whitten. David Chicoine.

This paper examines and compares the spatial organization of residential compounds in order to reconstruct patterns of neighborhood and urban life at the Early Horizon of Caylán (800-1 BC), Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru. Systematic surface mapping combined with limited horizontal excavations indicate that the urban core of the ancient city was composed of more than 40 residential complexes articulated through a series of streets and corridors. Detailed first-hand mapping of streets...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Harkey.

In the Yanamarka Valley in central Peru, the Late Intermediate Period saw dramatic changes. Whole villages moved from the valley floors to dense, defensible hilltop settlements, and were still living there when the Incas colonized this region a century later. The remote locations of many of these sites – both those forcibly abandoned under Inca rule, and those which continued on into the early Colonial Period – mean that numerous domestic round houses, storage spaces, patio walls and pathways...