Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association最新文献

This paper examines the shift to enclosed forms of residence and modular living in the context of emerging urbanism during the Early Horizon in the Nepeña Valley, north-central coast of Peru. During the local Nepeña phase (800–450 cal BCE), complex agrarian groups living in the lower portion of the coastal drainage interrupt constructions at ceremonial centers of the Chavín and Cupinisque religious traditions and relocate on the valley margins, most notably at Caylán (800–1 cal BCE). Regional data suggest that religio-political turmoil and increased conflicts played a significant role in the nucleation of human groups. Indeed, the following Samanco phase (450–150 cal BCE) is associated with the construction of extensive defensive structures and the relocation of human populations. Architectural data point to the existence of more than 40 gated complexes at Caylán. Based on preliminary excavation data, those are interpreted as multifunctional residences. This paper offers an empirical case study to evaluate the usefulness and flexibility of the concept of neighborhood in the context of co-resident gated communities. By examining the layout and planning of the Caylán settlement, and the architecture and spatial variability of its multifamily compounds, we consider potential forms of household, community, and neighborhood organizations. Based on excavation data and demographic estimations we explore the heuristic value of the concept of neighborhood to understand face-to-face interactions between members of the different gated communities. We suggest that those communities might be comparable to the house societies of anthropological literature. Regional data, meanwhile, suggest that groups merging at Caylán maintained hinterland connections including with agrarian and maritime communities.

Case studies from two distinct geographic and historical contexts are analyzed here with respect to the model of neighborhood-as-nexus. Sector B South, an urban neighborhood from 14th century Peru and Chicago's 20th century Bronzeville neighborhood are examined with respect to a) how they integrated neighbors and families with diverse social identities, b) the various geographical and historical processes that brought these neighbors together, and c) how each neighborhood was integrated into a wider urban and regional landscape. Sector B South and Bronzeville illustrate how wider processes alight in everyday life for urban residents. More generally, these cases provide an opportunity for exploring how a neighborhood approach can help bring clarity to the similarities and differences in the social experience of everyday life between two temporally and geographically distinct societies.

This chapter introduces the central themes in this volume and articulates those themes with previous approaches. Neighborhoods in this volume are integrative socio-spatial groups between the household and the settlement that are found in urbanizing landscapes. Previous theorizations of neighborhoods constrain them to specific populations or forms of sociality. Our cases show that the fundamental aspects of these theorizations (intermediate, distinct, cohesive, nested) can endure while population, morphology, and temporality vary. Neighborhood studies are presented as complementary to household, community, and urban/peri-urban studies, while attention is drawn to the diversity of forms neighborhoods take and diversity of themes neighborhoods help scholars address.

There is no question that traditional cities, including most urban centers studied by archaeologists, are and were typically sub-divided into numerous face-to-face communities or neighborhoods. However, the large size of even the smallest of these urban centers impedes the ability of archaeologists to generate the data needed for their full assessment. As a result, all of the papers in this volume consider the interaction between neighbors—which is certainly an important issue for understanding the structure of early urban societies—but an overall analysis of the structure of whole neighborhoods is rarely achievable.

Important aspects of the social, economic, and political lives of large villages, towns, and cities are spatially situated within neighborhoods. In ethnohistoric central West Africa, identities derived from multi-family social “houses” with large membership frequently intersected neighborhood identities. Drawing from archaeological and ethnohistoric examples, this chapter explores how transformations in the nature of houses over time enabled the development of neighborhoods and wards in the region. At the long-lived settlement of Kirikongo, Burkina Faso (ca. 100–1700 CE), changing house identities were fundamental to a major sociopolitical transformation from a hierarchically organized community to a more egalitarian one. The restructured and now larger settlement was integrated through the physical and social opening of houses to the greater community, including the establishment of crosscutting practices and institutions. The resulting community was rooted in equitable economic interdependence between houses and characterized by a presence of a stronger spatial identity at the settlement level. As these are also typical of ethnohistoric settlements with neighborhoods and wards, the Kirikongo case study provides an example of the potential pathways by which settlements may have successfully combined the strong identities of multi-family houses into larger, spatially oriented units. In some cases, these changes may have been critical elements for the development of urbanism.

In 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers and designed to house around 10,000 individuals, these centers followed a rigid, gridded layout that allowed for the rapid construction of what were ostensibly cities. Residential sections were laid out in blocks, each containing barracks buildings to which internees were assigned on arrival. Five seasons of intensive pedestrian survey at the Granada Relocation Center National Historic Landmark, Colorado (also known as Amache), accompanied by extensive oral histories, has determined that these residential blocks became neighborhoods with individual character and personalities. Archaeological and archival data are used to examine the development of neighborhood identities and examine the relative utility of different data sets in identifying social interaction as a proxy for neighborhood identities. Archaeological research at Amache reveals the physical modifications and artifacts found in residential blocks. Distinct differences in densities and types of artifacts along with the development of coordinated blockwide landscaping and centrally located communal features show that internees were developing neighborhood-based communities. These indicate the role that new social relationships, developed within the confines of camp, along with the influences of existing social ties and sets of behavioral traits, had on the formation of neighborhoods. This chapter uses social network data drawn from historic newspapers to examine the levels of interaction occurring between residents of the same residential block and between different areas of the camp. Social network data will be used to explore the role that social interaction had in the creation and maintenance of neighborhood identities. These different lines of data converge to highlight how neighborhoods defined by distinct sets of activities and residential traits were being formed within the institutional setting of Amache.

In this chapter, we argue that research on intermediate-scale socio-spatial units can benefit from collective action theory. Accordingly, we posit that institutions developed to promote cooperation help shape urban landscapes. A cross-cultural sample of 30 premodern states from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and South America is used to evaluate this hypothesis. The results indicate that highly collective cities tended to be large and dense with public investment in road networks, canal systems, public drinking water, and uniform administrative wards (neighborhoods) centered on public buildings or spaces. In cases with lower collectivity, centralized investment in public goods tended to be comparatively lower. Cities varied from dispersed, low-density settlements to disordered, large, dense aggregations. In the dense settlements, some residents organized at the neighborhood scale to solve collective action problems associated with public goods supplies, whereas others did not. In dispersed urban landscapes, neither the state nor local social groups organized to solve collective action problems. In low-collectivity cases, other factors such as patron–client relationships, forced resettlement, kinship, etc. predominate. Thus, we conclude that archaeological analysis of urban landscapes can provide information on the political-economic strategies employed by the state and other members of society.

There are many examples of colonial entanglements resulting in shifts in religions, practices, subsistence, and political structures, largely linked to inequalities between the colonized and the colonizers. However, there are also examples in which practices, particularly among Native American societies, persisted in the context of social situations that intertwined peoples with diverse histories. At the time of Spanish arrival, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were a large-scale, hierarchical society with supra-community integration and were able to maintain high degrees of autonomy. Our focus here is to explicate the early colonial world of the Calusa. Specifically, we want to understand why early European interactions take such a dramatically different course in southwestern Florida than in other areas of Spanish colonization. To do so we use political ecology and recent scholarship on eventful archaeology to consider Calusa and Spanish social and political action. Our work focuses on interactions between the Spanish and the Calusa during the early and mid-sixteenth century (ca. 1513 to 1569 CE). We argue that because the Calusa were fisher-gatherer-hunters, lacked maize agriculture, and had their capital on the defensible island of Mound Key, Spanish-Calusa interactions and events transpired in a fundamentally different context compared to other Spanish outposts and colonies. With this example, we show how various events, knowledge, and traditions of the Calusa of southern Florida all worked to create a vastly different colonial entanglement that resulted in the Spanish abandonment of the area for some time.

The social and political power of marginal highland dwellers is examined through comparison of historical and archaeological data in early Sweden and modern Lesotho, southern Africa. Upland dwellers negotiated political and environmental challenges while struggling to establish community in the face of high taxation, uprooting, and violence. Current understandings of the medical and psychosocial impacts of such challenges indicate that individuals experience severe stress, but also intense attachment to their environment, even when living in highly marginal places with tenuous livelihoods. This nexus may help clarify similar archaeological cases.

The notion of “sustainable development” has drawn attention to the precarious balance between populations and natural resources in terms of current and future needs. Approaches to the study of sustainability that focus on socio-ecological systems may obscure the fact that what is sustainable at a broad scale may not be optimal for an entire population. Political ecology offers a complementary lens to investigate how relationships between humans and their environments unfold within historically situated structures of power. Archaeology provides a means to extend the historical gaze of political ecology to account for long-term patterns of sustainability at multiple scales. This paper applies an archaeological approach to the historical political ecology of the northern Basin of Mexico. Specifically, it focuses on the people who settled in the wetland environment of Lake Xaltocan and their dynamic relationships with each other, land, and water over the last 2500 years. Over this time, local actors have adjusted to a variety of external constraints, from ecological change to political upheaval. A long-term perspective reveals how politically-situated actions transformed Lake Xaltocan physically and conceptually and how the sustainability of local regimes was unevenly determined by access to power rather than the husbanding of resources.