After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shadreck Chirikure. Munyaradzi Manyanga. Genius Tevera.

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. What was night life like at Great Zimbabwe? While this question excites imagination in numerous ways, in fact and myth, not much is known about nocturnal life in this ancient African urban landscape. Most archaeological reconstructions of urban life at Great Zimbabwe create the erroneous impression that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

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. Populated by as many as 200,000 people, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan—like most cities—was buzzing with activity through the night. Given the dynamism of the city, and especially weighed against our modern understanding of the sounds and lights that keep cities alive during the night, it is significant that one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan M. Alt.

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. Cahokia may not be the first place to come to mind when thinking about urbanism, but given new thinking and discoveries from a series of major excavations at and around this novel kind of city, views about the causes and consequences of American Indian urbanism are substantially changing. In part this is because...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nan Gonlin. Meghan Strong.

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. In the modern world, we are constantly surrounded by natural and artificial light that blends day into night. As a result, the contrasts between day and night, and their associated activities, have been deadened in our contemporary urban environments. This blurring has also bled over into our examination of cities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Cabrera Romero.

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. What was daily life like after sundown in the ancient city of Wari, Peru? What events took place and who was involved in them? In this paper, activities of the night and the sacred rituals that occurred in the ancient capital of the Wari Empire are explored from evidence that denotes the advanced practice of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Janusek.

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. Most treatments of Andean urbanism and urban life emphasize the acts and rhythms of daily life. Ethnohistoric documentation of life in Cuzco, nevertheless, details a rich corpus of ritual sequences and domestic activities that ideally took place under cover of night. In Tiwanaku today, night is an ontological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Strong.

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. Given the modern abundance of artificial light, it is often assumed that ancient cultures had the means and desire to illuminate the night. The paucity of artificial lighting devices from ancient Egypt challenges this assumption and has led scholars to conclude that the evidence must be there, but earlier...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau. Christopher Hernandez. Nancy Gonlin.

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. As the sun set on the horizon, ancient city dwellers would have felt the cooler air, heard cicadas’ songs, and perhaps tasted a late-night snack. Their vision, however, would have suffered the most as dusk turned to night and some form of illumination was necessary to see others, carry on activities, or get to bed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Weiner.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Toby Evans.

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...