Journal of Archaeological Research最新文献

Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were economically and socially important to recent agropastoral societies. However, archaeological models emphasize cattle keeping and downplay the role of hunting among past farming groups. To address this discrepancy and investigate human–wild animal interactions over the last ~ 2000 years, we examined zooarchaeological data from 54 southern African Iron Age (first and second millennium AD) farming sites. Diversity and taxonomic information highlights how often and what types of animals people hunted. Comparisons with earlier and contemporaneous forager and herder sites in southern and eastern Africa show that hunting for social and economic purposes characterized the spread of farming and rise of complex societies in southern Africa. The long-term cultural integration of wild animals into food-producing societies is unusual from a Global South perspective and warrants reappraisal of forager/farmer dichotomies in non-Western contexts.

For 40 years, political collapse has been increasingly prominent in anthropological archaeology. Throughout that period, scholars have grappled with defining collapse and asked why sociopolitical systems fragment. In this article, I explore emerging research on the aftermath of collapse. Focusing on the Americas, I consider the development of theoretical models and expanding analytical scope. Highlighting key themes, I propose that although cross-cultural archaeological data do negate narratives of apocalypse and disappearance, an overemphasis on post-collapse continuity also obscures the heterogeneity and dynamism of post-collapse periods and the creativity and resilience of populations who live through them.

Throughout the history of archaeology, researchers have evaluated human societies in terms of systems and systems interactions. Complex systems theory (CST), which emerged in the 1980s, is a framework that can explain the emergence of new organizational forms. Its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics and account for human agency make CST a powerful analytical framework for archaeologists. While CST has been present within archaeology for several decades (most notably through the use of concepts like resilience and complex adaptive systems), recent increases in the use of methods like network analysis and agent-based modeling are accelerating the use of CST among archaeologists. This article reviews complex systems approaches and their relationship to past and present archaeological thought. In particular, CST has made important advancements in studies of adaptation and resilience, cycles of social and political development, and the identification of scaling relationships in human systems. Ultimately, CST helps reveal important patterns and relationships that are pivotal for understanding human systems and the relationships that define different societies.

Since the 19th century, the study of shell middens has played an important role in archaeological research. Shell midden and broader coastal archaeology have transformed our understanding of human relationships with aquatic habitats, demonstrating the importance of marine environments to human evolution and ecology, the colonization of islands and establishment of maritime trade networks, changing social and political dynamics, and a variety of other issues. During the past two decades, shell midden research has greatly increased, marking an exciting time for new discoveries and heightened collaboration with Indigenous communities. Several key research trends in shell midden archaeology during the past 10–15 years include research on site distribution and temporality, underwater archaeology, historical ecology, terraforming, landscape legacies, and community collaboration. These research trends demonstrate the ways in which shell midden archaeologists are shaping our understanding of the human past and environmental change around the world.

Island archaeology is a well-established field within the wider discipline, but African contributions to it remain scarce. The Canary Islands are unusual in the broader African context for their relatively long history of occupation (~2000 years) and the intensity with which archaeological research has been, and is, undertaken there. Much of that research, however, has focused on specifically Canarian issues, including efforts to demonstrate connections between the islands’ initial settlement and the Classical Mediterranean world. Relatively little of it has been conducted within the broader comparative framework that an island archaeology perspective provides. Additionally, much of the Canarian literature is not directly accessible to non-Hispanophones. In response, I synthesize what is currently known about the archaeology of the Canary Islands, focusing on determining when, how, and by whom they were first settled; the impacts of human settlement on their environments; inter-island variability in precolonial subsistence, social, and political trajectories; and the record left by European contact and subsequent colonization, which began in the 14th century AD. As well as pointing to further opportunities for research within the archipelago, I simultaneously map out several areas where archaeological work there could contribute to wider debates in island archaeology as a whole.