Courtyards, Plazas, Paths: Empty Spaces Full of Meaning

Summary

In recent years, geophysical survey techniques have allowed archaeologists to identify subsurface cultural features—a dataset that has filled previously empty spaces on our site maps and made our interpretations of ancient landscapes all the richer. Significantly, geophysical datasets reveal not only features, but also the empty spaces in between those features. This paper explores the spaces between geophysical anomalies—the courtyards, plazas and paths that are common yet rarely investigated spatial components of Mississippi Period (AD 900-contact) sites in the southeastern United States. Plazas, courtyards and paths are spaces between built architecture that can have potentially different meanings and allow for different types of social interactions. I review some of these possibilities before turning to Parchman Place, a case study that illustrates the organizing yet flexible nature of such spaces. At Parchman Place and sites like it, it is the spaces between more visible archaeological features that structure daily interactions among people and that give us important clues about changing sociopolitical relationships in the past.

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 (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Mind the Gap: Archaeological Approaches to Null Data Spaces   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage