12 Pathways through the Archaeology of Neighborhoods

Abstract

For such a ubiquitous urban form, neighborhoods have been subject of relatively sparse systematic archaeological scrutiny or theorization. This collection starts with first principles about social vectors of cooperation, and how neighborhoods emerge not only as durable manifestations of cooperation, but as human-nonhuman assemblages for the production and dissolution of cooperation and community. Much as in the case of “community”, neighborhoods derive their social efficacy and ethos of belonging both through their seemingly irreducible affordances of quotidian interaction and through more or less self-conscious rituals or habits of affiliation. These both produce and are products of the material remains of neighborhoods that archaeologists study. With this generative view of neighborhood materiality in mind, this essay surveys the landscape of the archaeology of communities, and seeks pathways through the theoretical and methodological challenges it poses, as presented in the contributions to this volume.