Ephemeral Aggregated Settlements: Fluidity, Failure or Resilience?

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stefan Brannan. Jennifer Birch.

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. Large aggregated settlements have been a persistent feature of the settlement landscape of the Eastern Woodlands of North America for more than 3000 years. By the turn of the first millennium ephemeral agglomerated settlements become common settings for the enactment of practices and traditions that presage the next...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Simon Stoddart.

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. Etruria, the urban landscape of first millennium BC central Italy, is renowned for its powerful stable urban places. This projection of power not only conceals the Rise of Rome, which profoundly affected these urban centres, but also the dynamism of the Etruscan urban landscape in the interstices between the metropoles....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Shott.

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. Archaeology views hunter-gatherers as nature’s children or launching pads to complex society. Ethnographic hunter-gatherers exhibit fission-fusion cycles that we explain variously, including modular organization of group sizes (e.g., "scalar-stress"). However well models explain ethnographic pattern, archaeological tests...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Manuel Fernandez-Gotz.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caroline Von Nicolai.

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. In many parts of Temperate Europe, the first aggregated and fortified urban settlements developed in the Early Iron Age. However, many of these settlements disappeared after a few generations. After a period of decentralization lasting at least two centuries, another episode of settlement aggregation took place in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roland Fletcher.

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. By convention urban settlements have been described as densely inhabited, permanently sedentary, and usually protected by barriers. While the latter might be conceded the other two were, until early in the 21st century, assumed to be definitive and fundamental to the functions of urbanism. The definition was a pillar of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Sanmark.

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. This paper will address Viking-age ritual sites (cult sites assembly (thing) sites) in Scandinavia and Iceland from the perspective of their seasonality. These sites were used for gatherings of various kinds seemingly at certain points of the calendar year. Calendrical rituals formed a key part of Viking-age religion,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Søren Sindbæk.

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. Maritime trading emporia were nodal points of social networks and economic interactions in Viking-age Scandinavia. Despite their social centrality, archaeology shows that such places were rather small, unassuming, and sometimes short-lived settlement. This contrasts with a wealth of evidence pointing to communities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael E. Smith.

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...

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...