Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association最新文献

This article analyzes two distinct bronze sculptural monuments, one from the fourth-century BCE Mediterranean and the other from present-day South Korea, to examine how the politics of gender and difference shape heritage and heritage work. Although different in historical and geographic contexts, the monuments both represent women whose gendered and ethnic differences were mobilized by opposing political actors first to justify the violence enacted against them and then to contain or cover their monuments to engender what I call “carceral heritage”—heritage that is physically and symbolically policed by historical powerholders.

A select group of Boreda women in southern Ethiopia bolster their sense of prestige and dignity as mothers and leaders through their ancestral landscapes, Bayira Deriya. These Boreda women conveyed their knowledge to me and endowed me with the responsibility to share it only after my longitudinal commitment to becoming a listening cultural apprentice and after becoming a mother. Importantly, their wisdom taught me an alternative way of perceiving motherhood and gender justice and led to a significant scientific discovery for the world.

Neighborhoods are places of social interdependence expressed in material forms of proximity represented by closely packed households, pathways, and open spaces. Archaeological remains provide the opportunity to analyze neighborhoods as the physical locale of urban residence that included daily routines of eating, sleeping, and self-care; regular acquisition of provisions; and interactions with other people. However, the experiences of neighborhood interaction were not unique to the urban form. In the Indian subcontinent in the mid-first millennium BCE, there were three configurations that brought people together into crowded physical and social spaces, each of which provided the opportunity for repeated, standardized, and routinized mutual interdependence: urban settlements, religious pilgrimage centers, and army encampments.

A twenty-hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that central authorities laid out at the low, southeastern base of the Giza Plateau as housing and infrastructure for building pyramids shows distinct components that reflect how they mobilized labor into collective action for building on a colossal scale through already existing social bonds and home-based fellowships from districts, villages and neighborhoods. Correlation between this architectural footprint, builders’ graffiti, and recently discovered papyrus day logs with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Ensconced alongside the major Nile port of its time, community members served in both ships’ crews and work gangs with links to broader interregional networks. It is possible that immigrants from source countries who specialized in procurement and transport of exotic products contributed to ethnic diversity in the distinct components of “downtown Egypt.” Brought together in a central settlement much larger and denser than any at home, each occupant experienced an exponential increase in social interactions. But we see hints that, as authorities multiplied social clusters for collective action and established procurement networks of broad spatial range, they preserved home-based fellowships. It may have been true for downtown Egypt at the pyramids that, regardless of a city's size, everyone lived in villages and neighborhoods.

American Indian neighborhoods were very much under construction during the late-eleventh century at Cahokia in the American Bottom region of southwestern Illinois. A social order that transcended pre-Mississippian village life may now be defined based on large-scale excavations at East St. Louis and Cahokia proper. Architectural patterns and craft production debris within the greater central complex indicate possible religious, if not political or ethnic, divisions that did not form organically. At least some of this architecture was built specifically for sheltering and engaging other animate beings. The central problems in this analysis are distinguishing residential neighborhoods from other kinds of occupational zones and human neighbors from other-than-human residents. To this end, we generate new measures of architectural diversity, density, and positioning to identify the elements of Cahokian neighborhoods and examine how they were created and reconfigured.

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.

An investigation of Late Moche hamlets, hillside ceremonial sites, and large monumental centers in the Jequetepeque Valley (650–850 CE) reveals that neighborhood-like groupings were tied to rural and kin-based communities. However, the diversity of settlement types and the non-fixed nature of Jequetepeque “neighborhoods” reveal that North Coast political landscapes defy reduction to an Asiatic mode of urbanism or related village-state models. Instead, the distinctive neighborhood configurations are best explained in terms of historically specific religious and political ideologies. In contrast to the permanently occupied cities of Huacas de Moche and Pampa Grande, traditional neighborhoods, understood as spatially bounded social units, poorly describe the densely populated but pulsating political landscape of the Jequetepeque region. Nevertheless, the archaeological evidence indicates that intra-settlement sociopolitical associations, transcending familial or household allegiances, were consciously maintained and materialized in specific settlements, even when occupation was ephemeral and seasonal. The construction of such (imagined) communities, both within and between different settlements of the Jequetepeque Valley, was determined in large part by rituals of commensality and the sharing of food with tutelary huacas.

To test the value of the neighborhood and community concepts for understanding the archaeology of neighborhoods in the urban landscapes of the late Early Dynastic city-states and the Akkadian state in ancient Mesopotamia, this chapter examines socioeconomic changes in the material culture across occupation levels in a residential area at Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), Iraq and investigates processes by which the area became a more uniformly elite set of households. Tell Asmar was one of several major urban settlements in the lower Diyala River region, with occupation of the site extending back into late prehistory. The research dataset comprises a limited subset of archaeological evidence recovered from the Tell Asmar Northern Palace Area and the Private Houses Area by the 1930s Oriental Institute of Chicago Diyala Expedition excavations and concentrates on late 3rd millennium BCE residential occupation levels, architecture, and artifacts, as well as ancient texts. A detailed analysis compares one household with a life cycle that spanned the late 3rd millennium with the households of three late Akkadian houses that appeared alongside the architectural reorganization of the Northern Palace Building. This chapter seeks not only to explore the roles of private households within an urban Mesopotamian neighborhood but also to show that the Private Houses Area and the Northern Palace Building continually evolved as a neighborhood because residents were constantly negotiating and maintaining interconnected private and official relationships, and as one community, they shared in the growth, decline, and resurgence that connected them to broader socioeconomic and political developments.