Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory最新文献

This article focuses on the taphonomy of inequality visible in within-church burials from the site of the Church of St. George at Đurđevac-Sošice, a Medieval church in Northern Croatia. Building on concepts of Whitehead’s Poetics model, the three-body model, and landscape archaeology, we examine the role of church architecture in the development and affirmation of social inequality though burial practices. Burial within church spaces was typically limited to those of higher social status (relative to the rest of the community). Here we examine how those practices acted both as leveling acts that promoted group identity at the same time as they highlighted social inequality. This theoretical model is then used to understand more about the use of the Church of St. George at Đurđevac-Sošice as a burial location. The Church of St. George was used as a place of worship from twelfth until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and as a place of burial (as far as the current research has shown) between the twelfth and first half of the sixteenth century. During excavations in 2017–2019, 243 graves were identified, many of which were disturbed or incomplete due to subsequent burial activity during the use of the church as a burial location. These disturbances resulted in a large amount of comingled remains from within the fill of the recognized graves, as well as from levels which resulted from overlapping of younger burial fills over older ones.

On the Caribbean island of St. Croix, archival documents reference settlements of runaway enslaved Africans in the mountainous range known as Maroon Ridge. These settlements provide an important record of Afro-Atlantic resistance to enslavement. However, as both intentionally secluded and ephemeral places of refuge, these maroon settlements are difficult to locate in the archaeological record. Geospatial modeling provides one avenue for understanding African geographies of resistance. Building on prior geospatial modeling efforts, this paper uses a GIS-based multicriteria suitability analysis to characterize the shifting affordances of marronage on Danish colonial St. Croix across the second half of the eighteenth century. By considering how the island landscape “looked” to those seeking refuge, we trace how possibilities for refuge were distributed through space and over time. In this paper, we develop affordance heuristics to model refuge using digitized historic maps and publicly available LiDAR data. The resulting model suggests shifting maroon refugia sites over time and demonstrates how geospatial approaches, paired with historical archives, can model historic affordances across time.

The human cranium is probably the most common single anatomical element manipulated after the death of the individual. However, it is not uncommon to find isolated crania for which it is difficult to unequivocally determine the nature of the deposition, either intentional or natural. In order to establish whether naturally deposited and intentionally deposited skulls are characterised by different taphonomic patterns, we evaluated the state of preservation of 75 isolated crania (68 naturally deposited and 7 intentionally deposited) from sites in Africa, Europe, Near East and Asia, from approximately 2 million to 20,000 years BP. As a comparative reference, we evaluated the preservation pattern of further 101 skulls from individuals buried in primary deposition at two cemeteries. Finally, to determine whether the breakage pattern of skull-cups (skulls intentionally modified and manufactured into bowls) mimics a natural skull breakage, we analysed the preservation pattern of 19 skull-cups from archaeological and ethnographic contexts. Preservation and breakage patterns were evaluated using the Zonation method and the Landmark method. Results suggest that the intentionally deposited skulls have a pattern of preservation similar to the skulls found in cemeteries, and for both these categories, skulls were generally better preserved than naturally deposited skulls. The natural breakage pattern of isolated skulls also significantly differs from the breakage pattern of skulls modified into skull-cups, suggesting that it is unlikely that skull-cups were fashioned in a manner that imitates natural breakage patterns.

Despite interest in preindustrial markets, archaeological discussions have largely been limited to proposing methods to determine the presence or absence of market exchange in ancient societies. While these contributions are important, methodological limitations have prevented theoretical considerations of the emergence and evolution of marketplaces and market exchange in prehistory. We propose that agent-based modeling provides a window to explore physical conditions and agent behaviors that facilitate the emergence of customary exchange locations and how such locations may evolve into socially embedded institutions. The model we designed suggests that simple bartering rules among agents can generate concentrated locations of exchange and that spatial heterogeneity of resources is the most important factor in facilitating the emergence of such locales. Furthermore, partner-search behaviors and exchange of information play a key role in the institutionalization of the marketplace. The results of our simulation suggest that marketplaces can develop, even with the absence of formalized currency or central planning, as a consequence of collective strategies taken up by agents to reduce exchange partner-search costs and make transactions more frequent and predictable. The model also suggests that, once established as a social institution, marketplaces may become highly conservative and resistant to change. As such, it is inferred that bottom-up and/or top-down interventions may have often been required to establish new marketplaces or relocate marketplaces to incorporate new resources, resolve supply–demand imbalances, or minimize rising economic costs that arise as a result of social, political, and economic change.

Archaeologists all over the world face problems regarding complexity and disorganization. Whether surveying, excavating, or doing laboratory analysis, the nature of the evidence of prehistoric societies is fragmented and incomplete. On a global and very general basis, the older the site, the greater the fragmentation, the more the missing data, and the greater the disorganization that the archaeologist must navigate to understand the past. Of course, there are notable exceptions. Most archaeologists consider the topic from the specificity of a particular time, a particular place, and a particular society. In this paper, it is considered in its most non-particular and general format. In order to do so, the paper creates an artificial archaeological region that is surveyed and excavated to a greater and lesser extent and analyzed with a variety of statistical and graphic evaluations. It concludes that when all other things are equal, increasing fragmentation causes far more disorganization and increases complexity than does missing data. Thus, fragmentation is a far more important problem for archaeological interpretation than relatively small amounts of missing data.

Abstract

Geographic information systems (GIS) has been used in archaeology for four decades, and colloquially appears to have become a main tool in the geospatial aspects of archaeological practice. In this paper, we examine temporal trends in the use and/or mention of GIS in archaeological publications (books and journal articles), conference presentations, and websites. We gathered data through keyword searches and with formal sampling surveys and conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses to characterize the changing nature and intensity of GIS use in archaeology over time, and then contextualize these trends with a narrative history of archaeological GIS. We show how archaeological GIS-use has grown from a few early adopters of the 1980s, through a slow initial integration phase in the 1990s, to a set of two major expansions in the 2000s and 2010s. While we find that applied use of GIS has grown to the point where it can be considered ubiquitous—if not completely universal—in the discipline, we also discovered that the major focus in archaeological GIS advancement is methodological rather than theoretical. We identify five roadblocks that we believe have hampered the development of a theory-rich archaeological GIS: (1) deficiencies in the archaeological GIS education model, (2) over-reliance on commercial software, (3) technical/technological barriers, (4) gaps in acceptance of GIS, and (5) the perception of GIS as “just a tool.” We offer initial suggestions for ways forward to mitigate the effects of these roadblocks and build a more robust, theoretically sophisticated relationship with GIS in archaeology.

Over the last several decades, the application of aDNA and strontium isotope analyses on archaeologically recovered human remains has provided new avenues for the investigation of mobility in past societies. Data on human mobility can be valuable in the reconstruction of prehistoric residential patterns and kinship systems, which are at the center of human social organization and vary across time and space. In this paper, we aim to contribute to our understanding of mobility, residence, and kinship patterns in late Prehistoric Iberia (c. 3300–1400BC) by providing new strontium data on 44 individuals from the site of Humanejos (Parla, Madrid). The study presented here is multi-proxy and looks at these new data by interweaving biological, chronological, and archaeological information. This analysis found that 7/44 individuals buried at Humanejos could be identified as non-local to the necropolis. Although more men (n = 5) than women (n = 2) were found in the non-local category, and more non-local individuals were identified in the pre-Bell Beaker (n = 5) than in Bell Beaker (n = 1) or Bronze Age (n = 1), we find no statistically significant differences concerning sex or time period. This contrasts with other archaeological datasets for late prehistoric Europe which suggest higher female mobility, female exogamy, and male-centered residential patterns were common. At Humanejos, we have also identified one non-local female whose exceptional Beaker grave goods suggest she was an individual of special status, leading to additional questions about the relationships between gender, mobility, and social position in this region and time period.

Archaeological studies of early weaponry have relied for decades on ethnographic parallels—whether from ethnohistorical accounts, ethnographic literature, or from objects studied in museum collections. While such accounts and collected objects provided key data in the past, including of morphometrics and functionality, few studies have explored the quality of such data. In this paper, we critically assess a dominant theoretical paradigm, namely the utility of ethnographic collections to assess Pleistocene archaeological material. Our focus is how ethnographic spear morphometrics are used to propose delivery methods of archaeological weapons. We discuss the archaeological significance of early spears, and the role that ethnography has played in interpreting them. We provide new morphometric data of ethnographic wooden spears, which have been used analogically to assess the earliest archaeological hunting tools. We systematically collected data from ethnographic collections of wooden spears in five museums in the UK and Australia including mass, length, diameters and point of balance, alongside any recorded information on provenance and use. Older datasets, as well as the data in this paper, are limited due to collection bias and a lack of detailed museum records. By subjecting the new data to statistical analyses, we find that with a few exceptions morphometrics are not reliable predictors of delivery as thrusting or hand-thrown spears (javelins). Prevalent hypotheses linking variables such as mass, tip design, or maximum diameter with delivery are unsupported by our results. However, the descriptive statistics provided may remain useful as a means of comparative data for archaeological material. We conclude that using simple morphometrics to parse weapon delivery has had a drag effect on forming new and interesting hypotheses about early weapons.

Abstract

Accurately reconstructing past human population dynamics is critical for explaining major patterns in the human past. Demand for demographic proxies has driven hopeful interest in the “dates-as-data” approach, which models past demography by assuming a relationship between population size, the production of dateable material, and the corpus of radiocarbon dates produced by archaeological research. However, several biases can affect assemblages of dates, complicating inferences about population size. One serious but potentially addressable issue centers on landscape taphonomy — the ways in which geologic processes structure the preservation and recovery of archaeological sites and/or materials at landscape scales. Here, we explore the influence of landscape taphonomy on demographic proxies. More specifically, we evaluate how well demographic proxies may be corrected for taphonomic effects with either a common generalized approach or an empirically based tailored approach. We demonstrate that frequency distributions of landforms of varying ages can be used to develop local corrections that are more accurate than either global corrections or uncorrected estimates. Using generalized scenarios and a simulated case study based on empirical data on landform ages from the Coso Basin in the western Great Basin region, we illustrate the way in which landscape taphonomy predictably complicates “dates-as-data” approaches, propose and demonstrate a new method of empirically based correction, and explore the interpretive ramifications of ignoring or correcting for taphonomic bias.

Early Southern Mesopotamia shows a complex history of expansion of (irrigated) farming in relation to urban developments and changing landscapes. As a first step to study expanding irrigated farming system, an irrigation-related agent-based model was developed to explore farm(land)s and irrigation systems in relation to decision-making processes, both of farms and their farmlands (an agriculture unit) and collective decision-making processes for irrigation system management—especially sharing water between farms. The decision-making processes include options to move farms, expand the system, or start a new system, as these would be options available for Mesopotamian farmers as well. In this text, we report how model parameters contribute to the generation of various patterns of yields and expansion of farms and system. Additionally, the Gini coefficient (based on yields) is applied to estimate levels of inequality among farmers. Our results show how (1) human decision-making determines the level of influence of and benefits for farms, as well as the overall irrigation system; (2) Gini values effectively capture the degree of inequality in yields among farms based on water availability; and (3) our model is a suitable base for further study, by incorporating additional agents into the irrigation system and expanding the spatial–temporal scales of the irrigated landscapes, to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of irrigation systems in Southern Mesopotamia.