City Nights: Archaeology of Night, Darkness, and Luminosity in Urban Environments

Summary

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 of the past. Both low-density and high-density urban environments were significantly and experientially different from our modern experience, even a hundred years ago. This evolving urban nightscape can be examined from many perspectives. A focus on the archaeology of night and darkness allows us to envision nocturnal cityscapes that inhabitants navigated to perform particular activities, as well as the objects associated with those activities. The study of ancient lighting (lychnology) brings to the fore how and how much early urbanites lit up their spaces to participate in nightlife, nightshifts, and other nightways. Lighting devices also provide insight into the cost of these implements and the social prestige that illumination provided. A consideration of how much planning was done to urban landscapes for nocturnal activities reorients our perspective from day to night. This orientation is enhanced by sensory archaeology when we consider how the senses engaged with the ancient urban night.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23356