Browse

The latter part of the fifteenth century BC saw Egypt's political power reach its zenith, with an empire that stretched from beyond the Euphrates in the north to much of what is now Sudan in the south. The wealth that flowed into Egypt allowed its kings to commission some of the most stupendous temples of all time, some of the greatest dedicated to Amun-Re, King of the Gods. Yet a century later these temples lay derelict, the god's images, names, and titles all erased in an orgy of iconoclasm by Akhenaten, the devotee of a single sun-god. This book traces the history of Egypt from the death of the great warrior-king Thutmose III to the high point of Akhenaten's reign, when the known world brought gifts to his newly-built capital city of Amarna, in particular looking at the way in which the cult of the sun became increasingly important to even ‘orthodox’ kings, culminating in the transformation of Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III, into a solar deity in his own right.

The turbulent reign of Stephen, King of England (1135–54), has been styled since the late 19th century as 'the Anarchy’, although the extent of political breakdown during the period has since been vigorously debated. Rebellion and bitter civil war characterised Stephen’s protracted struggle with rival claimant Empress Matilda and her Angevin supporters over ‘nineteen long winters’ when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘Christ and his Saints slept’. Drawing on new research and fieldwork, this innovative volume offers the first ever overview and synthesis of the archaeological and material record for this controversial period. It presents and interrogates many different types of evidence at a variety of scales, ranging from nationwide mapping of historical events through to conflict landscapes of battlefields and sieges. The volume considers archaeological sites such as castles and other fortifications, churches, monasteries, bishops’ palaces and urban and rural settlements, alongside material culture including coins, pottery, seals and arms and armour. This approach not only augments but also challenges historical narratives, questioning the ‘real’ impact of Stephen’s troubled reign on society, settlement, church and the landscape, and opens up new perspectives on the conduct of Anglo-Norman warfare.

Historic plantation sites continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and black heritage, particularly concerning their relevance in American life. Although slavery and black history are erased from the contemporary landscape of Carroll Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the historical and archaeological record preserves their importance to the Carroll family and the plantation called Georgia or Mount Clare. Enslaved blacks held essential roles in every aspect of Mount Clare from circa 1730 to 1817. They became culturally American at the intersection of race and status, not only through the practice of their own cultural beliefs and values, but those of elite whites as well. In freedom, formerly enslaved individuals and families became part of the growing middle class of Baltimore. Until recently, the story of the people who experienced slavery and freedom went untold, disabling contemporary peoples from their right to access their heritage. Plantations can further social justice and enable all people’s right to access their heritage when underrepresented historical groups are integrated into interpretations of historical house museums and landscapes. Focus on white ancestors reveals only part of the history of Mount Clare: blacks’ own achievements cannot be ignored.

This book is meant to show how archaeologists worldwide understand and reconstruct ancient political systems, and more specifically, how Maya archaeologists have reconstructed political power, institutions, and dynamics among ancient Maya states during the Classic period in the first millennium A.D. The book engages with the theoretical literature in political anthropology, the debates and history of how archaeologists have reconstructed ancient politics, and then describes specific cases of archaeological projects that focus on political questions across the world, and more specifically, in the Maya civilization of the Classic period. It summarizes studies of Maya political organization, again by highlighting the debates, issues involved, manners in which the questions are approached, and specific projects that have focused on political questions. The author’s investigations at Motul de San José are used to highlight some of the main points of these current debates. Politics dominate today’s public arena, and this book will provide a window into how archaeologists reconstruct and understand ancient politics and their dynamics. This exploration of ancient Maya politics tries to answer the question of why the political landscape was so dynamic during the apogee of Maya civilization in the first millennium A.D. by focusing on political analysis at three levels: the macro level of polity and inter-polity relations, the middle level of political organization and dynamics within each polity, and the micro level of individuals, households, communities, and power blocs within each polity.

Pottery sherds are the most abundant artifacts recovered from ancient Maya sites. Analyzed correctly, they reveal much about artistic expression, religious ritual, economic systems, cooking traditions, and cultural exchange in Maya society. Today, nearly every Maya archaeologist uses the type-variety classificatory framework for studying sherd collections. Ancient Maya Pottery brings together many of the archaeologists signally involved in the analysis and interpretation of ancient Maya ceramics and offers new findings and state-of-the-art thinking. The result is a book that serves both as a valuable resource for archaeologists involved in pottery classification, analysis, and interpretation and as an illuminating exploration of ancient Maya culture.

Traditional treatments of marriage among indigenous people focus on what people say about whom one should marry and on rules that anthropologists induce from those statements. This volume is a cultural and social anthropological examination of the ways the indigenous peoples of lowland South America/Amazonia actually choose whom they marry. Detailed ethnography shows that they select spouses to meet their economic and political goals, their emotional desires, and their social aspirations, as well as to honor their commitments to exogamic prescriptions and the exchange of women. These decisions often require playing fast and loose with what the anthropologist and the peoples themselves declare to be the regulations they obey. Inevitably then, this volume is about agency and individual choice in the context of social institutions and cultural rules. There is another theme running through this book—the way in which globalization is subverting traditional hierarchies, altering identities, and eroding ancestral marital norms and values—how the forces of modernization alter both structure and practice. The main body of the book is given over to eleven chapters based on previously unpublished ethnographic material collected by the contributors. It is divided into three sections. The first collects essays that describe the motives behind breaking the marriage rules, the second describes how the marriage rules are bent or broken, and the third gathers chapters on the effects of globalization and recent changes on the marriage rules.

This collection offers a new understanding of communities of French heritage in the New World, drawing on archaeological and historical evidence from both colonial and post-Conquest settings. It counters the prevailing but mistaken notion that the French role in New World histories was confined largely to Québec and New Orleans and lasted only through the French and Indian War. Some chapters in the volume reveal new insights into French colonial communities, while others concern the post-Conquest Francophone communities that thrived under British, Spanish, or American control, long after France relinquished its colonies in the New World. The authors in this collection engage in a dialogue about what it meant to be ethnic French or a French descendant, Métis, Native American, enslaved, or a free person of color in French areas of North America, the Caribbean, and South America from the late 1600s until the late 1800s. The authors combine archaeological remains (from artifacts to food remains to cultural landscapes) with a rich body of historical records to help reveal the roots of present-day New World societies. This volume makes clear that, along with Spanish, British, and early American colonial influences, French colonists and their descendant communities played an important role in New World histories, and continue to do so.

All parts of the Caribbean were shaped by similar forces, including race-based chattel slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the tropical and sometimes deadly natural environment. Within these commonalities, however, is also a great deal of diversity. Large sugar plantations populated by hundreds of enslaved Africans rightfully receive a great deal of attention from archaeologists, historians, and the public. The authors in this volume, however, use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal the stories of places and times where the rules of this system did not always apply. Collectively, the chapters focus on the spaces in-between, alternate views of plantation landscapes, and the complex dynamics at play in the days following slavery. The authors assess these threads through the analysis of lesser known contexts, such as Dominica, St. Lucia, and the Dominican Republic, and the reexamination of more familiar places, like Jamaica and Barbados. Despite grueling work regimes, and the social and economic restrictions of slavery, people held in bondage carved out places at the margins of plantation societies. In similar fashion, the lives of poor whites, soldiers, and free people of color demonstrate that binary models of black slaves and white planters do not fully encompass the diverse landscape of Caribbean identities before and after Emancipation. The studies in this volume employ innovative research tools to integrate data from a variety of historical and archaeological sources to better understand these alternate stories within and beyond the sprawling sugar estates.

The purpose of this book is to engender ideas and discussion regarding broader issues related to historical ecology. The unifying topic of the case studies presented in this volume is that they deal with groups that are pursuing small-scale economies. Small-scale economies in this context refer to groups primarily making their living by hunting, gathering, fishing, or limited agricultural endeavors. The volume is divided into two sections. Part I consists of historical ecology case studies of small-scale economies from various regions around the world, including Denmark, California's Channel Islands, Japan, the Georgia Coast, Mexico and American Southwest, Coastal Brazil, and the mountains of Montana. The case studies span a wide variety of climates and encompass a temporal scale that begins in the late Pleistocene and extends to modern-day groups. In Part II, researchers from multiple disciplines, including anthropology and ecology, offer their thoughts and perspectives on the themes explored in the volume as a whole and the theoretical future of historical ecology. All the contributors to this volume consider the relevance of such inquiry with respect to modern society's interaction with the environment.

Ancestor veneration is a common practice cross-culturally, and since the 1990s archaeologists have started to explore ancestor veneration in the past. The usual explanation for ancient ancestors is that people in past societies used them and their material correlates (architecture, iconography, tombs, and cemeteries) to validate their rights to land and resources. Yet ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of ancestor veneration around the world indicate that ancestors are about much more than just land and resources: they referee domestic problems; advertise wealth; validate authority; materialize identity; and negotiate power and status relationships. The Archaeology of Ancestors explores these dimensions of ancestor worship, as well as the more traditional association of ancestors with resource rights. In addition to providing an alternative to the usual approach to ancestors in the past, this volume includes a comprehensive, authoritative overview of the anthropology of ancestors, exploring its historical roots, discussing key ethnographic sources, and summarizing the ways that ancestors have been identified archaeologically. The Archaeology of Ancestors provides world-wide archaeological coverage of the topic, treating the traditional “core” areas of East Asia and Africa as well as Central and South America, Greece, and central Europe. Contributors approach the issue of ancestors in the past using several lines of archaeological evidence, including human remains, art and iconography, structured (e.g., ritual) deposits, architecture, and historical documents.

This book is about how displacement associated with long-distance population movements and the relationships migrants maintain with both home and host societies shape their consumer habits and the formation of collective diasporic identities. These themes are addressed using an interpretive framework rooted in interdisciplinary literature on transnationalism, diaspora, and material consumption and are developed through an archaeological study of the everyday lives of Chinese and Japanese immigrant laborers at a turn-of-the-twentieth century industrial salmon cannery in British Columbia. Results demonstrate that migrant consumption patterns draw on traditions from the homeland but are influenced by a range of factors at the local, regional, and international levels. Furthermore, diasporic identities are as much a product of the migration process as of homeland traditions, and consumer goods play an important role in how they are constructed and maintained. Overall, this study accomplishes three things: (1) it paints a portrait of the contextual factors affecting how migrant consumers maintain some homeland practices and adapt others from the host society; (2) it develops a model of ethnicity that is shaped and transformed as cultural traditions from home and host societies come together; and (3) it outlines a framework for how migrant communities use consumer goods and practices to maintain a sense of diasporic identity in the face of displacement and associated culture change. This research is one of the first in-depth studies in historical archaeology on overseas Japanese migration and the first detailed comparison of archaeological material from Chinese and Japanese sites.

Archaeology of Early Colonial Interaction at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba, examines the interactions between indigenous peoples and European invaders in the Caribbean and the way in which domination imposed by a foreign model ultimately transformed this relationship into a system of colonial subordination. Investigations of the domestic and funerary contexts at the El Chorro de Maíta, in the northeast of Cuba, permit the archaeological visualization of the cultural and ethnic diversity imposed by colonial domination. Presented, for the first time, is the identification and archaeological study of an indigenous village that was transformed during the 16th-century into a town of Indian encomendados, which is to say working for the Spanish as forced labor. The study distinguishes the Christianization of the indigenous inhabitants, principally among those of elite status, and the process of ethnogenesis which gave rise to the “Indian” as a colonial category. This occurred in a scenario where indigenous mortuary practices were maintained, and handled and restricted the Hispanic material culture. It treats the process that created the cemetery with syncretic characteristics, in which there is an adjustment to a process of transculturation where the cultures and the individuals are transformed, and in which the indigenous peoples demonstrated a capacity for resistance and adaptation that is generally underestimated. This book demonstrates the value of archaeology to observe unrecorded episodes of Caribbean and American history that are vital for constructing the link with the pre-Columbian world and the construction of an integrated and new history.

This book clarifies the dynamics of shipbuilding traditions evolved in East Asia, explained based on the detailed investigations of excavated ships in the region. The previous shipwreck study in East Asia regarding past seafaring, human migration, and material-culture transportation was highly focused on wreck cargo. The hull remains of individual shipwrecks have been only solely reported. This is the first comprehensive study of the early and medieval East Asian ships in the field from the viewpoint of nautical and maritime archaeological perspectives. It incorporates the archaeological examination of the hull structure and construction methods into an interpretation of the chronological development of shipbuilding technologies. Understanding the technological innovation is critique to the role of the ships that played in water transportation, maritime trade, and naval conflict in East Asian history. The author presents an extensive dataset of excavated coastal and oceangoing ships dating from the 1th century to the medieval periods excavated in China, Korea, and Japan. Three case studies of the 13th–14th century ship remains from China, Korea, and Japan are presented to identify technological innovations that occurred in shipbuilding industries along the middle and southern coast of China. Identifying such phenomenon leads to understanding three major spheres of shipbuilding traditions in the areas of the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea.

Based on papers presented at the Society for Historical Archaeology meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, the chapters in this edited volume detail results of archaeological investigations at several fortifications associated with the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The fort sites extend from the southern frontier (the Carolinas and Tennessee) to the Great Lakes and encompass individual farmsteads as well as colonial posts projecting imperial power in disputed zones. While most of these forts were short lived, some, such as Michilimackinac and Frontenac, survived for extended periods. This text does not claim to present a complete archaeological overview but is instead topically representative of work being done on both major and minor French and Indian War fort sites. Generalized comparison of artifact assemblages is included, along with a glossary and an extensive bibliography of the period’s archaeological resources.

Intentional communities, including religious, utopian, and communal societies, have long been a feature of the American social and economic landscape. This volume describes and discusses historical archaeology’s contributions to our understanding of intentional communities throughout American history. Scholars across many disciplines have long been interested in communal experiments for their optimistic ideals, dramatic methods, and often eventual failures. Archaeologists’ focus on the material world and lived experiences of community members adds depth and complexity to our historical knowledge about these people. Sometimes our work demonstrates the ways that communitarians enacted their ideals. At other times it shows how daily practices diverged from a group’s ideal path. Often it makes us rethink the questions we ask about how communities are formed and maintained. Structured according to the scale of methodological focus—from settlement patterns and landscape, to the built environment, to artifact studies—the case studies presented in this volume will give readers a thorough introduction to archaeological research to date in this field. An expanded case study will describe archaeological research on the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth of late nineteenth-century California. The closing chapter discusses the social and political implications of retelling past experimental communities’ stories in publications and historical reconstructions.

As a discipline, archaeology often provides amazing insights into the past. But it can also illuminate the present, especially when investigations are undertaken to better examine the history of institutions such as colleges and universities. This book offers a series of case studies to reveal the ways archaeology can offer a more objective view of changes and transformations that have taken place on college campuses in the United States. From the tennis courts of the College of William and Mary to the “iconic paths, lawns, and well-ordered brick buildings” of Harvard University, this volume attempts to change the ways readers look at their alma maters — and at archaeology. Also included are studies of Michigan State, Notre Dame, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Illinois, North Carolina, Washington & Lee, Santa Clara, California, and Stanford.

Household archaeology is a methodological and theoretical approach to domestic sites that can address essential social issues in the past. Beyond the Walls brings together contributions from today’s leading archaeologists and scholars who study the archaeology of households. This volume represents the breadth of perspectives on, and approaches to, the archaeology of households in North America. While previous volumes tackling this subject tend to be limited in scope, the research presented here is not restricted to a single historic time period, region, or culture. Instead, readers are exposed to the diversity of ways in which the people of the past navigated, negotiated, and contested the circumstances of their lives, as reflected in the archaeological remains of their dwellings. Beyond the Walls serves to inspire students and professional archaeologists alike to think differently about the archaeology of households within the historical sphere. It highlights current innovative ideas and methods in the field of household archaeology and provides an important contribution to the study of both the archaeology of households and the cultural landscapes they inhabit.

Using the concept of materiality as an interpretive framework, Carrie Sulosky Weaver presents an interdisciplinary examination of the Passo Marinaro necropolis (ca. 5th to 3rd c. BCE) for the purpose of reconstructing the synchronic dynamics, state of health and mortuary practices of Kamarina, an ancient Greek city-state in southeastern Sicily. By considering material evidence from the necropolis together with findings from the biological study of the human remains, a more complete portrait of the Kamarinean people emerges. The majority of people did not live past young adulthood, and throughout their lives, most experienced dental diseases, some developed degenerative joint disease, anemia and bone infections, others possessed physical deformities, and a few were the victims of interpersonal violence and possibly cancer. Kamarina was a place where magic and surgery were practiced, and individuals of diverse ethnicities and ancestries were united in life and death by shared culture and funerary practices. Through the combination of methods drawn from classical archaeology and physical anthropology, this study, the first of its kind for Greek Sicily, sheds new light on the life- and deathways of Kamarina in the 5th through 3rd c. BCE.